Multi-core changes the world. For software developers, multi-core is an opportunity or a headache if you're not prepared.

With new multi-core processors like the Intel Core 2 Duo, hardware is only part of the performance story. One technique to fully utilize multi-core processors is to thread the application so it runs in parallel on multiple processor cores.

Parallel programming is not intrinsically harder than what we do now, but it is different. Multi-core software tools must address key problems related to abstraction of thread management and correctness verification.

Decades ago programmers looked to high-level languages to abstract machines so that Fortran, COBOL and C could replace assembly language programming. In time, abstraction grew to include C++, Java and C# to name a few. Now, we need to avoid thinking that parallelism is exploited through Windows threads and pthreads. A new open source tool will be announced that makes it much easier for developers to realize significant gains with each new processor innovation.

While multithreading can be a challenge, software development tools can help simplify the process by debugging threaded applications and identifying performance opportunities. We’ll present a methodology that has been used to successfully thread many applications and discuss tools that can assist in developing multi-threaded applications.

This technical session will help you hone your programming skills for exploiting parallelism.