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Multicore Boom Needs New Developer Skills PDF Print E-mail
Microsoft research scientist Dan Reed points to a worldwide shortfall of experienced parallel or multicore computing experts, and Microsoft and Intel announced that they will donate $20 million to several American universities to promote advances in multicore programming research. "To gain performance from quad-core processors and prepare for the denser multicore CPUs that will follow, application developers need to write code that can automatically fork multiple simultaneous threads of execution (multithreading) as well as manage thread assignments, synchronize parallel work, and manage shared data to prevent concurrency issues associated with multithreaded code," wrote the authors of a recent Forrester Research study. The report notes that major operating systems and the bulk of middleware products are already prepared for multithreaded operation and for "near term" multicore processors, and that corporate development shops may turn to independent software vendors to address the problem via development tools and platforms that can better accommodate multicore-related chores. However, Reed is convinced that multithreading over time will become "part of the skill set of every professional software developer." Meanwhile, major software vendors and chip makers have been attempting to boost awareness of the challenges and potential of multicore programming. For example, TopCoder and AMD just started a series of contests that emphasize multithreading.
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