Multicore boom needs new developer skills

More than charity lies behind Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp.'s announcement this week that they will donate $20 million to a pair of U.S. colleges in the hope of spurring advances in parallel, or multicore, programming research, a Microsoft research scientist said.

"There is a worldwide shortage of people experienced in parallel computing experience, for sure," said Dan Reed, director of scalable and multicore computing at Microsoft. "One of the collateral reasons is to raise awareness in the academic community, because that's where the next generation of developers will come from."

For years, ever-higher clock speeds almost guaranteed that application code would run faster and faster, but the rules are different for today's multicore processors.

The difference has been compared to a sports car and a school bus. While the first is capable of blazing speed, the other moves more slowly but can move far more people at once.

The problem is, simply adding more cores to a computer's CPU doesn't increase the speed or power of conventional application code, according to a recent report from Forrester Research Inc.

"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," the authors wrote.