Three rival teams of computer researchers are working on new types of software needed for parallel computing.

Stanford University and six computer and chip makers plan to announce on Friday the creation of the Pervasive Parallelism Lab, joining the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in this research.

Intel acknowledged in 2004 that it had hit what was essentially a heat barrier in designing ever-faster microprocessors and aggressively shifted to multicore designs. Now there is a rush to develop tools for mainstream programmers who have spent their entire careers designing software for sequential, not parallel, programming systems.