...computing experts wonder whether this time the hardware developers have raced too far ahead of many programmers' ability to create software.

Faisal Saied, senior research scientist for Information Technology at Purdue, said that parallel computing has been an esoteric skill limited to people involved with high-performance supercomputing. That is changing now that desktop computers and even laptops are multicore.

"High-performance computing experts have learned to deal with this, but they are a fraction of the programmers," Saied said. "In the future you won't be able to get a computer that's not multicore, and as multicore chips become ubiquitous, all programmers will have to learn new tricks."

Even in high-performance computing there are areas that aren't yet ready for the new multicore machines.

"In industry, much of their high-performance code is not parallel," Saied said. "These corporations have a lot of time and money invested in their software, and they are rightly worried about having to...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.




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