NEC Corp has said it is to start work with France’s Institut National de Recherche en Informatique, INRIA, on a research and development project in the field of advanced parallel computing. The work, which will be based in France, is intended to bring user friendly parallel computing one step nearer to reality, according to NEC. The research will revolve around NEC’s Cenju-3 parallel computer, installed at INRIA’s Rennes center in November last year, and will follow three main themes: the design of a shared virtual memory across physically distibuted systems; research into high performance Fortran compilers; and the integration of parallel algorithms for finite element analysis applications. The Cenju-3 can be scaled up to 100 processors, each connected via a high-speed network with distributed memory.