When Four Dimes Can't Make A Penny- Multicore Processors

Multi-core processors are here, and the amount of cores are bound to increase fast. That's good. There's bound to be problems, of course. That's bad. How do you get the things to talk to one another without crashing the whole system? Technology Review examines the challenges faced by programmers when dealing with multiple cores:

Historically, writing software for multi-core systems has been the job of experts in the supercomputing world. But with the coming age of personal supercomputers, average programmers also need to be able to write software with multiple cores in mind. "That's a scary thing," says Krste Asanovi, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, "because most have never done that, and it's quite difficult to do." Asanovi and his colleagues are tackling one of the main challenges that programmers face when they try to write software that will run efficiently on multi-core systems: coordinating multiple tasks that run on separate cores in a way that doesn't cause the system to crash.

I file this under: Nice Problem To Have - Too Much Horsepower.

Read the whole thing here. Text will still work on one core, I think.