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The shift to multicore architectures in commodity microprocessors brings with it the reality that, as Marc Snir said at a recent press conference (http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/2246496.html), "programming" and "parallel programming" must become synonymous. The processors we are seeing now, and will continue to see in at least the medium-term, will offer performance improvements only to those applications that can take advantage of many cores at one time. Since software customers generally expect applications to do more in less time, software developers have a strong incentive to parallelize their codes. But developers generally don't have the skills they need to make this change.