"It's very important to make sure, if at all possible, your program can run in a single thread with concurrency off," Reinders said. "You shouldn't design your program so it has to have parallelism. It makes it much more difficult to debug."

Citing Intel efforts, Reinders said the Intel Parallel Studio toolkit, geared to parallel application development in C/C++, was in a beta release and has thousands of people using it. "The idea here [with] this project was to add parallelism support to [Microsoft's] Visual Studio in a big way," said Reinders. Components of Parallel Studio include Intel Parallel Composer, for compiling and debugging; Intel Parallel Inspector, to find synchronization errors; and Intel Parallel Amplifier, to find bottlenecks and tune applications. It also finds problematic locks.

As part of Intel Parallel Studio, the company also offers Intel Threading Building Blocks, an open source technology to extend C++ for parallelism. On the horizon is the company's Parallel Advisor tool, due in the second quarter of this year, providing design phase capabilities. It combines capabilities of Inspector and Amplifier. Either later this year or early next year, Intel plans to extend Amplifier and Inspector to Linux, Reinders said.

Reinders also noted Intel's planned many-core processor, codenamed Larrabee, for high-performance graphics capabilities.