True of False? If you already have an application that is multithreaded and running on a multiprocessor system, moving to multicore is completely painless. Why are people making such a big deal of this 'multicore thing'?

Most of us have read about the philosophers dining with insufficient chopsticks and the curved section of single-track railway in the mountain pass. These are the beginner examples of resource conflict and deadlock that serve as an introduction in comp sci texts to the challenges of parallel execution.

But they are coarse examples, and the world of multiprogramming today is very finely grained indeed.

Applications properly designed for multithreading on a single processor using all the approved locks and semaphors can still misbehave on multiple processors.

Welcome to Parallel Worlds, a blog hosted by Stephen Blair-chappell. Stephen is a Technical Consulting Engineer at Intel, and has worked in the Intel Compiler Lab for the last 10 years. Prior to joining Intel, Stephen worked as a lecturer at the University of Central England, specializing in Software Engineering and Embedded Systems. Outside of work, Stephen enjoys playing the pipe organ, and is an accomplished musical instrument restore

Since Cameron started this discussion on ICOT, what were they really trying to achieve and what did they actually accomplish? What states of ah-wareness did they experience? When examining their original purpose and their findings, they must have experienced allot of Ah naw and Ah hem Multicore Moments.

One of the biggest multicore challenges these days is converting those serial programs to parallel. The Silver Bullet is the tool that allows you to 'push a button' and voila - out pops parallel code. Many companies are working on proprietary solutions, all with varying degrees of functionality and purpose. There are also many efforts underway at the various research institutions (which include the development of new programming languages). How about if we alleviate some of the issues of parallel programming by combining forces and sharing knowledge and experiences? An effort is underway to develop a best practices guide by committee. I'll be back with some specific examples that have been contributed.

The goal of PetraVM, a startup launched by University of Washington computer science professors Mark Oskin and Luis Ceze, is to develop technology for writing more reliable multi-threaded code for multi-core architectures.

James Reinders, author of Intel Threading Building Blocks: Outfitting C++ for Multi-core Processors, recently took a few minutes to talk about going parallel.

Q: James, are software developers ready for parallelization, or are we lacking the fundamental building blocks -- parallel algorithms, compilers, tools, and the like -- needed to effectively build concurrent applications?

You can always tell when the developers roll out something before marketing has a crack at "preparing" it. And that ususally starts with the name of the product or the title of the paper. Take, for instance, the programming model for graphics pipelines created and described a team of researchers from Stanford University and Microsoft Research.

Welcome to my new blog. Chances are good that if you read this blog for the next 5 years, I'll have the opportunity to explain what it really takes to make multicore happen. One reason it will take so long is because it is a complex subject, and I'm probably not the first to tell you that. But the real reason is because most of the solutions to make multicore happen haven't even been created yet (although many vendors would beg to differ). Regardless of the reasons, I'll use this first session to share a bit of my background to give you a perspective on where I'll be coming from on my blogs....

It seems that we are having more and more Multicore Moments these days. With clusters and clouds everywhere we find ourselves with almost more porridge than we can eat. The operative word being almost. This "thinking in parallel" thing has turned out to be both treacherous and addictive at the same time.

I don't know about you, but I'm stoked about the Super Bowl. No, I haven't stocked up on chips, queso dip, and beer. Heck, I'm not even much of a pro football fan. But with the news that Dreamworks Animation, Intel, Pepsi, and NBC are planning a big 3-D movie promotion around the Super Bowl, I didn't waste any time dusting off the 3-D glasses that Intel and Dreamworks Animation handed out at the Intel Developer's Forum last August.