With the emergence of multicore processors, parallel processing is the new reality. By the end of 2007, nearly all the microprocessors Intel ships will be multicore. As a developer, you need to ask yourself, “Am I prepared to program for parallel performance?”

To keep their software applications in synch with multicore hardware, developers will likely "thread" their applications so they run in parallel. This can be a daunting task. You’ll face three challenges when trying to exploit parallelism:

The first challenge is thinking through the scalability of your program. Can you get an 8X performance increase when you go from two threads to sixteen?

The second challenge is how to obtain confidence in a multithreaded app. Parallel programming can introduce a new set of problems such as deadlocks and race conditions.

The third challenge is ease of programming. How to code in a maintainable manner will go far to make your experience with parallel programming a successful one. Developers have had to deal with programming languages that haven't been extended or that don't comprehend parallelism. Some of the ways of introducing threading add a lot of complexity to a program that isn’t necessary.

This talk will discuss ways to overcome these challenges and new tools that will help translate multicore power into application performance.