Ulrich Drepper, Red Hat

With the speed of individual cores no longer increasing at the rate we came to love over the past decades, programmers have to look for other ways to increase the speed of our ever-more-complicated applications. The functionality provided by the CPU manufacturers is an increased number of execution units, or CPU cores.

To use these extra cores, programs must be parallelized. Multiple paths of execution have to work together to complete the tasks the program has to perform, and as much of that work as possible has to happen concurrently. Only then is