Leveraging the full power of multicore processors demands new tools and new thinking from the software industry.
Concurrency has long been touted as the "next big thing" and "the way of the future," but for the past 30 years, mainstream software development has been able to ignore it. Our parallel future has finally arrived: new machines will be parallel machines, and this will require major changes in the way we develop software. The introductory article in this issue ("The Future of Microprocessors" by Kunle Olukotun and Lance Hammond) describes the hardware imperatives behind this shift in computer architecture from uniprocessors to multicore processors, also known as CMPs (chip multiprocessors). (For related analysis, see "The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software.")