Programming methods for multicore

There have been many advances in programming paradigms (functional, object-oriented) and programming methodologies (agile, extreme); but much development is still done with a single or a small number of processors in mind. This has to change in order to take advantage of the power of multicore machines. Researchers at Berkeley are aiming to change this by developing new parallel methodologies.

Using [their] approach, one team created a program that reduced the time needed to create an MRI image from one hour to one minute. The code is already being used at a local children's hospital.
In another example, the approach reduced the time to handle object recognition from 222 seconds on an Intel Nehalem processor to 1.8 seconds on a massively parallel Nvidia GTX 280 chip. Other efforts in areas including speech recognition, option trading and machine learning showed results ranging from 11 to 100-fold performance gains.

See more on Berkeley's progress in parallel programming.