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With the emergence of multicore and manycore processors, engineers must design and develop software in drastically new ways to benefit from the computational power of all cores. However, developing parallel software is much harder than sequential software because parallelism can't be abstracted away easily. Authors Hans Vandierendonck and Tom Mens provide an overview of technologies and tools to support developers in this complex and error-prone task. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The computer industry is experiencing a major shift: improved single processor performance via higher clock rates has reached its technical limits due to overheating. Fortunately, Moore's law still holds, so chip makers use transistors to boost performance through parallelism in multicore and manycore processors. However, exploiting the full potential of these processors requires parallel programming. Thus, a large number of developers need to parallelize desktop applications, including browsers, business applications, media processing, and other domain-specific applications. This is likely to result in the largest rewrite of software in the history of the desktop. To be successful, systematic engineering principles must be applied to parallelize performance-critical applications and environments. In light of these developments, we're pleased to present this special issue on programming methods, tools, and libraries for parallelizing desktop applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]