We've been trying to figure out exactly what the attraction is. What is it that causes someone to be drawn to a book that explicitly states that it's for dummies? Is it the yellow and black motif? Maybe because 'dummy' rhymes with 'yummy'? What exactly causes someone to reach for a book entitled 'X for Dummies'?

You already know that achieving a linear speedup as the number of cores increases in real life parallelized applications is indeed very difficult. However, sometimes, the multicore scalability of certain algorithms for existing multicore systems could be worse than expected. The overhead and the bugs introduced by concurrency could bring really unexpected scalability problems when the number of cores increases. Intel can help you with a free service in the cloud.

I know, I know, a lot of folks out there are big subscribers to the 'just-get-'er -done' school of software maintenance and development. The idea of sitting somewhere while a design group is doing its work is just plain torture. It feels like a waste of time and money. Somehow there's always a fire that demands that we code now and capture the design later.

NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) architectures are becoming popular in HPC (High-Performance Computing) scenarios. Therefore, it is very important to work with efficient and optimized memory allocators. QuickThread is a new commercial C++ multicore programming library loaded with many optimizations for NUMA architectures, bringing a new option to create high-performance parallelized code.

Of all the techniques I use to speed up code, the one I like the most comes with just the press of a button, or more precisely at the swap of a compiler Every Intel compiler has this particular option, and I consider to be a great friend. I'm making a point of keeping you in suspense for a little while longer. Let me first tell you a couple of stories that prove the point.

Whilst designing and developing applications targeting netbooks and MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices), one of the great questions is whether there is a real possibility of scaling to more cores in the near future. There's no need to think about the future. The Intel Atom family is already offering a dual-core microprocessor with Hyper-Threading, two physical cores and four hardware threads.

Google launched Go, a new systems programming language born with concurrency, simplicity and performance in mind. Do you have time to learn another programming language this year?

Last week we gave the webinar scene a break. Instead, Tracey talked me into going with her to the new Bill Gates Hillman Complex located on Carnegie Mellon campus in Pittsburgh. Holger Hoos from the University of British Columbia was giving a talk called "Taming the Complexity Monster". I figured how could we go wrong!

Debugging a parallelized application requires more information on the screen than debugging sequential code. Sometimes, even Full HD monitors aren't enough to display all the necessary windows at the same time. Luckily, Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 offers a very intuitive multi-monitor support.