NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) architectures are becoming popular in HPC (High-Performance Computing) scenarios. Therefore, it is very important to work with efficient and optimized memory allocators. QuickThread is a new commercial C++ multicore programming library loaded with many optimizations for NUMA architectures, bringing a new option to create high-performance parallelized code.

Google launched Go, a new systems programming language born with concurrency, simplicity and performance in mind. Do you have time to learn another programming language this year?

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 includes many interesting improvements related to its multicore programming features. The parallelism and concurrency profiling tools allow developers to visualize the behavior of a multithreaded application on multicore microprocessors and collect resource contention data.

Moblin v2.0 for Intel Atom Processor based netbooks is already available. Developers with Linux experience will find it easy to target this new attractive platform. However, many developers have many questions related to the multicore support offered this new operating system.

There is no doubt that Intel Atom is an attractive microprocessor. Netbooks, embedded systems, consumer electronic devices, and MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices) are using its different flavors. But can multicore programming skills be useful with these single-core CPUs?

Process Monitor is a very complete advanced monitoring tool that shows and logs real-time activity for the file system, the Registry, the running processes and their threads in Windows. Yesterday, the Windows Sysinternals team made the new version v2.7 of Process Monitor available for download.

All CPU Meter is a very simple sidebar gadget available for Windows Vista and Windows 7. It allows developers and users to check the microprocessor's usage and it shows an independent graph for each available logical core (hardware thread).

TMonitor, a new tool developed by the CPUID team, offers the possibility to understand what's going on with each hardware thread (logical core) on some modern multicore microprocessors.

Most modern Web pages run scripts. So far, there are many limitations to allow these scripts to take advantage of multicore microprocessors. However, Web Workers is a draft specification that defines an API to allow Web application authors to spawn background workers running scripts in parallel.

Visual Studio 2010, still in Beta 1, offers two new debugging windows: Parallel Stacks and Parallel Tasks. Using them, it is easier to understand the new Parallel Extensions offered by .NET 4.

.Net Framework 4.0 with its Parallel Extensions, still in Beta 1, will add the possibility to work with tasks. It is very important to understand that tasks aren't threads. Tasks run using threads. However, it doesn't mean they replace threads.

Fan, another new programming language developed in the multicore era, has recently launched its 1.0.45 release. It is a very active open source project with a very interesting approach to many modern concurrent programming challenges.

Applications developed using modern programming languages can become legacy code faster than expected. Multicore microprocessors have been found guilty of transforming outstanding serial code into legacy code in just a few years. However, there are many alternatives to translate multicore power into application performance making small changes to the legacy serial code.

On the one hand, Garbage Collectors simplify developers' lives, but on the other hand, they can become the greatest enemies of a parallelized algorithm's performance. Finally, Java 7 and .Net 4 are going to offer new Garbage Collectors really targeted for multicore microprocessors with large memories.

In this conversation with Timothy G. Mattson, Senior Research Scientist Intel, Computational Software Lab, we find close agreement on the best approach to applying parallelism to business and general application programming. But first we discuss quantum physics.

After a long silence since the last CTP (Community Technology Preview), Microsoft released the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 that comes with the new .Net Framework 4.0. This new release will bring new promising features that empower parallel programming using the supported languages.

Management professionals love metrics. However, they don't like the idea to optimize applications that are currently running. Thus, what about showing them some metrics about the power that they are wasting using a free tool?

Intel's Hyper-Threading technology was introduced with the 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 microprocessor. A few years later, the new Intel Core i7 processors offer Hyper-Threading again.

Java's development team understands the multicore revolution and is working hard in offering a new concurrency framework taking into account the new possibilities offered by the new microprocessors. Hence, JDK 7 (Java Development Kit 7) will offer the fork-join framework in order to help Java developers to tackle the multicore revolution using this popular programming language.

Parallel programming is not just about multi-threading and multi-core. There's also a lot of power in the SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) extended instruction set available in most modern microprocessors from Intel and AMD.