Unlocking Concurrency

Multicore architectures are an inflection point in mainstream software development because they force developers to write parallel programs. In a previous article in Queue, Herb Sutter and James Larus pointed out, “The concurrency revolution is primarily a software revolution. The difficult problem is not building multicore hardware, but programming it in a way that lets mainstream applications benefit from the continued exponential growth in CPU performance.” In this new multicore world, developers must write explicitly parallel applications that can take advantage of the increasing number of cores that each successive multicore generation will provide.