• Background on the emergence of mainstream multicore processors

• The key challenges facing software developers

• An introduction to multithreading concepts

• 20 questions to ask when going multicore

• Overview of available concurrency layers

Emergence of Multicore Processors

• The free lunch is over
• The multicore software triad
  

• Amdahl's Law
• A model for multithreaded execution
• Work
• Span
• Parallelism

Race Conditions: A New Type of Bug (for Most People)

• The lure of nonlocal variables
• Race conditions
• A simple example
• Using the dag model
  
• Atomicity
• Validating determinacy
• Coping with race bugs

The Folly of Do-It-Yourself Multithreading

• Three desirable properties
• A tiny example
• A version using native threads
• The impact on development time

Concurrency Platforms

• Thread pools
• Message passing
• Data-parallel languages
  
• Intel's Threading Building Blocks
• OpenMP
• Cilk++