Intel and Cray have been talking this week about building supercomputers with a million cores or brains, but how will all those processors-within-processors work together and communicate with one another and how difficult will it be to write applications that take advantage of all of them?

This is the question that Stanford University hopes to answer with its Pervasive Parallelism Lab, announced on Wednesday.

“Parallel programming is perhaps the largest problem in computer science today,” said Bill Dally, chair of the Computer Science Department.

“[It] is the major obstacle to the continued scaling of computing performance that has fuelled the computing industry, and several related industries, for the last 40 years.”

The problem has arisen because multi-core processors were too expensive until recently for all but high-performance computers, meaning few programmers have developed the expertise to take advantage of their new, affordable abundance.

Stanford says computer scientists fear the progress of computing could stall and that’s clearly a worry for the major microprocessor suppliers - Intel, AMD, IBM, Nvidia, HP and Sun are all supporting the new lab, which will pool the efforts of the university’s leading computer scientists.

It is also not the first initiative of its kind. Intel and Microsoft announced last month  they were investing $20m in research at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign  in the same area.

Stanford’s lab has a budget of $6m over three years. The aim is to develop a complete parallel computing system, covering everything from fundamental hardware to new user-friendly programming languages. This could lead to the system doing all the work for developers to optimise their code for parallel processing.

Tim Draper of famed Silicon Valley venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson has listened to hundreds of pitches from start-ups over the past few years, but only three put themselves forward as alternatives to the online marketplace eBay.

“I was surprised when he told me that,” says James Chong (pictured), founder and chief executive of Wigix, the fourth eBay challenger to cross DFJ’s path.

Wigix’s pitch was impressive enough for the VC firm to lead a recent $5.3m funding round for the Bay Area start-up and for Mr Draper to take a seat on the board.

“EBay has been sitting on its laurels, this area is in real need of innovation,” says Mr Chong.

He spent 11 years at Charles Schwab and the last five setting up its accounts site, before establishing Wigix a year ago.

That explains the financial bent to the marketplace that differentiates itself from eBay by treating items very like company stocks.

EBay started out by offering collectibles, unique items, which goes some way to explaining the site’s sometimes rambling search results.

Wigix argues that most items for auction are now distinct commodities, such as an 8Gb iPod Nano, and they can be found and their market prices tracked more easily by users and search engines when they have their own page and even their own stock-ticker symbol.

Wigix uses the bid/ask principles of buying and selling shares and makes it possible to show current market prices for these commodity items. It says this allows real-time trading and combats the problems on auction sites of shilling and sniping.

A My Wigix section allows users to keep lists of their own possessions, see the market value of them and even name a price at which they would be prepared to sell them.

This gives a notional boost to the liquidity of Wigix’s marketplace. In theory, items may also never leave the marketplace if someone buys something from another user and leaves it on their public list of available items.

Wigix employs around 30 people in offices in Oakland and Beijing, China, but it is encouraging users to help it by suggesting different SKUs and taking ownership of category and product pages. They can earn a cut from advertising on the page and even sell ownership of it to anyone bidding.

Extra features allow users to submit reviews and manuals and ask others about what they think of products they own.

Wigix’s organisation of its auction site makes a lot of sense, but it is likely to be under-represented in items that are hard to classify, such as collectibles and jewellery.

The real test will be whether those items trading as second-hand goods in various conditions can be turned into commodities and traded like stocks and shares.

At its public beta launch on Tuesday, the site was slow and seemed short of inventory, despite its claims of having 500,000 items available.

Nevertheless, it may benefit from dissatisfaction with eBay and its fees structure. Wigix has no listing fees, free trading below $25, a $1.50 fee for buyers above that and a 2 per cent fee for sellers up to $1,000, then 1 per cent above that.

That’s a lot easier to understand than eBay’s complicated explanation of its charges.

What should we make of the odd limbo into which Microsoft’s pursuit of Yahoo has fallen since the weekend, when it failed to follow through on a threat to go hostile? Here are the possible answers:

1. The two sides are just buying time while they stitch up a deal behind the scenes. Probability: miniscule. We’re still hearing that there haven’t been any discussions since early last week. When the bankers from both sides put their heads together at that point there was still no serious talk about price (one source suggests nothing has changed since day one, with Yahoo still holding out for $40 a share and Microsoft unwilling to budge from its opening offer, which is now worth more like $29.)

2. Microsoft is getting ready to walk away. Probability: a bit higher than miniscule, but not much. Proponents of the walk-away scenario hold that Microsoft has grown disgruntled at being rebuffed and that dissent in its own ranks, where a Yahoo deal is viewed with dread, has dulled its appetite. This sounds too trite. The move on Yahoo is a huge break with Microsoft’s past: the enormity of it points to how vital it is to control one of the Web’s leading advertising platforms (this could eventually become an important monetisation engine for much of its core software business as it moves online.) This takeover approach was not mounted on a whim. Whatever Steve Ballmer’s other character flaws, a lack of resolve is not one of them.

3. Microsoft is still trying to decide how tight it can turn the thumbscrews on Yahoo without incurring a backlash. Probability: Pretty high. The software company has shown an uncharacteristic restraint all along. There have clearly been people in the Microsoft camp who would have gone in all guns blazing from the start, but that is not how Ballmer has chosen to play it. He has probably calculated that there is a better chance of reeling Yahoo in faster by not forcing it to throw up the defences against a hostile bid. Ballmer was on the road in Europe last week, arriving back only over the weekend - after the Saturday deadline he had set three weeks before had already passed - so it makes sense to deliberate thoroughly on this before taking what could be a critical step. The next turn of the thumbscrew seems imminent.

4. (My favourite explanation.) Jerry Yang just had a baby. Maybe Microsoft just decided to take the heat off for a couple of days. Wouldn’t it be nice to believe that was true?

The queues for Grand Theft Auto IV, which went on sale at midnight, seem justified judging by the rave reviews for the latest game from developer Rockstar Games and its publisher Take-Two.

“Rockstar’s magnum opus is a modern-day masterpiece that could change the way the world views videogames,” said Gamespy.

Its New York-based location “Liberty City is nothing less than one of the greatest videogame worlds yet conceived,” said IGN.

“I now know how film critics felt after screening The Godfather …Grand Theft Auto IV doesn’t just raise the bar for the storied franchise; it completely changes the landscape of gaming,” said Game Informer.

Metacritic, which provides a weighted average score for games based on a wide range of reviews, has rated the PlayStation 3 version of the game as a perfect 100 and the Xbox 360 version as a 99.

The industry average for video games is around 68, with Nintendo games scoring highest at an average of 75, Sony following on 74, then Take-Two on 73 and Electronic Arts on 72.

Metacritic is widely quoted by the industry and the Mature-rated Grand Theft Auto franchise’s excellence has to be one big reason why EA has bid $2bn for Take-Two.

At its analyst day in February, John Riccitiello, EA chief executive, expressed his disappointment that EA’s Metacritic average had dropped 5 points in five years from 77 to 72.

He set a target for its fiscal 2011 year of reaching an average Metacritic score of 80.

EA is this year building better games than it has ever done, he believes, but just imagine the boost to those averages the addition of Rockstar would give.

Intel is taking the high road and its rival Advanced Micro Devices the low one in search of market share in different business segments, according to announcements on Monday.

Intel unveiled a partnership with the Cray supercomputing company. In an industry first, their engineers will work together on creating a new supercomputer for release around 2012.

They aim to reduce dramatically processing times for intensive applications such as medical imaging, cell modelling in genome research and hurricane forecasting. The high-performance computing market was worth $11.5bn last year, according to the IDC research firm.

Kirk Skaugen (pictured left), head of Intel’s Server Platforms group, and Peter Ungaro (right), Cray chief executive, told me that synergies between the two companies’ research teams would help them solve problems where components interconnected.  This was key to keeping processors fed with data and operating at maximum performance.

They would also work on how to take advantage of what is expected to be a grouping of as many as 1m processing cores in a single supercomputing system.

The two companies say they will work with academic institutions and government bodies to test their products.

Meanwhile, AMD introduced its AMD Business Class, aimed at small and medium-sized businesses. This is a new platform of chips designed to help PC makers target this segment with products. Both dual, triple and quad-core processors are featured combined with AMD and non-AMD graphics and chipsets.

Acer, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens and Lenovo all announced their support for the initiative.

What happens to all those logo-festooned tote bags, pens and other pieces of corporate schwag that get handed out ad-nauseam on the convention circuit? Sure, some of it eventually goes on to serve some useful purpose. But much of it goes straight into the bin.

Enter the Schwaggin’ Wagon. Born just ten days ago over lunch in LA, the Schwaggin’ Wagon has cut a high profile at this year’s Web 2.0 expo.

“I was having lunch at a Thai restaurant and I brought up the fact that there is a lot of waste in this schwag game,” says Michael Liskin, an LA-based social media consultant who is one of the group’s six founders.

Schwaggin’ Wagon’s mission is to raise awareness about wasteful schwag practices and, eventually, to find a better use for the mountains of conference bric-a-brac that would otherwise end up in landfills.

In just ten days, the Schwaggin’ Wagon crew has built a website, procured a van, and attracted more than 150 followers on Facebook. They plan to collect schwag from conference-goers and donate it to Innerkids, an LA non-profit that hosts after-school programmes local youth. 

Eventually, the group hopes to act as a bridge between conference producers and a number of charities who can distribute things like leftover t-shirts and pens to people who really need them. 

It is still early days, but judging by the reaction among conference-goers, Schwaggin’ Wagon has struck a nerve. Several Web 2.0 companies have lent their support to the project and organisers are looking for more sponsors.

Mr Liskin stresses that the group’s goal is not out to eliminate schwag altogether -  a potentially Sisyphean task. Rather, it is to make everyone involved think twice about what happens to their wares once the party ends.  “It’s not about putting anyone out of business in any way,” he says. “It’s about streamlining and giving it more thought.”

It has been more than a year since we flagged Twitter as the most buzzworthy social application in Silicon Valley. Thirteen months later, the micro-blogging site, which allows users to follow each others’ short online updates, has become an indispensible tool for the online cognoscenti who have gathered at San Francisco’s Moscone Center for this year’s Web 2.0 expo.

Jenn Van Grove, a social media consultant, says Twitter helps her follow the latest online buzz and keep in touch with hard-to-reach people. “If I need to get in touch with someone, Twitter is much faster than email,” she says. 

Ryan Kuder, a former Yahoo who is working on a new web startup, assured me that time invested keeping track of contacts on Twitter returns dividends.  ”People ask if you can spend too much time on Twitter,” he says. “I say you can’t spend enough.”

Sceptical journalist that I am, I signed up for Twitter in March of last year but never really got into the service. Intrigued, I dug out my Twitter ID and passed it along to Jenn, Ryan and a few other bloggers seated at our table inside the Web 2.0 blogger lounge. I have now been Twittering for all of two hours, and thanks to my new Twitter friends, I’ve managed to attract more than 50 followers.  Better late than never, I suppose.

Yahoo chose the Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco today to announce its was rewiring its whole network.

Who knows what Microsoft will make of this, given its plans to acquire the company. Microsoft itself has launched its Mesh hybrid computing platform at the conference.

Yahoo’s new chief technology officer, Ari Balogh, told attendees its moves were not to build a new social network, but to “build social into everything we do.”

He showed off some smart retooling ideas such as a Yahoo Mail application that allows you to sort through your Inbox more efficiently - highlighting emails from people that are part of your closest social network. From today, the company is opening up its environment for developers to build applications that users can add to any Yahoo page.

Mitchell Baker, chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, used her keynote to talk about the Firefox browser being worked on for mobile phones. Fennec, named after the small version of a fox found in the Sahara Desert, is much faster than existing cell phone browsers, according to early reports.

Jonathan Zittrain, author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, spoke by video from London and answered questions in an online chatroom set up by the conference organisers. His argument seems to be that new smaller devices for accessing the internet, such as the iPhone, are more proprietary and closed than the internet accessed through a PC. Increasing use of them will stifle innovation, he says.

I’m not sure I agree, given how open the iPhone is becoming and the forthcoming virtualisation on mobile phones, which would allow them to run any kind of operating system or browsers like Fennec, which is open source and open to every kind of additional features.

You can read Richard Waters’ review of Jonathan’s book here.

Zap-pow! Web 2.0 and user-generated content have hit comic strips.

Bitstrips made waves at South by Southwest last month with its launch of a cartoon-building website that makes creating your own strip easy.

Now the internet-savvy Scott Adams has launched Dilbert 2.0, an online version of his strip that allows readers to change the punchline.

My Dilbert, where fans will be able to rewrite the whole strip, will follow in May, along with Group Mash, which allows users to collaborate and write different panels together.

The cartoonist already allows readers to search, rank, comment on and receive RSS feeds of his strips. He aims to work with his audience by authoring random frames and seeing if groups can successfully develop strips.

It sounds like the kind of spirit and teamwork that is singularly lacking in Dilbert’s fictional world and something that Catbert, Evil Director of Human Resources, would never allow.

We’re still a long way from Home.

Sony has just admitted that its virtual-world interface for the PlayStation 3 is going to arrive at least a year later than first expected.

Sony announced Home with an impressive demonstration at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in March last year.

With stunning graphics and simple controls, Sony showed how players could create avatars and experience games, movies and chats with fellow players through a far more sophisticated interface than Second Life or Microsoft’s Xbox Live.

However, a demo is easier than a full implementation and Sony appears to have underestimated the amount of development work needed.

Beta testing began last April, but a full launch planned for the autumn was then postponed to this month. Now Sony says an “open beta” service will launch this autumn.

“We have come to the conclusion that we need more time to refine the service to ensure a more focused gaming entertainment experience  than what it is today,” said Kaz Hirai, president of Sony Computer Entertainment.

The news is a disappointment after Sony appeared to be making a recovery with the PS3. Some big games are expected to boost console sales, starting with Gran Turismo 5 Prologue this month, exclusive to the PS3.

Home’s delay will not hit any financial projections though. Its revenue model was unclear and its only impact so far has been the wow-factor of Sony coming up with something genuinely innovative after being in the shadow of Nintendo and Microsoft.

Unfortunately, the continuing delays are turning wow into oh-oh.