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The two companies will work with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California, Berkeley. Together, the two universities will contribute an additional $15 million toward the creation of research centres at their campuses.

Parallel computing allows computers to run faster by dividing tasks over multiple microprocessors instead of using a single processor to perform one task at a time, but not many software companies know how to write software to harness the technology.

"Parallelism is the path forward to the unprecedented levels of performance that are needed to keep this growth going," says Andrew Chien, director of Intel research.

According to the partners, parallel computing could lead to major advances in robotics or software that could translate documents in real time in multiple languages, for example, or a digital personal health care assistant.

"We're really in the midst of a revolution in the computing industry," says Tony Hey, executive vice president of external research at Microsoft Research. "It really will profoundly affect the way we develop software."