The shift from single-core to multicore hardware platforms affects virtually all computing domains today. Multicore CPUs and heterogeneous system-on-chip platforms promise to meet skyrocketing application performance demands at moderate power and energy consumption. Yet, product quality requires more than powerful silicon chips. It is the software that makes the real difference. Suboptimal utilization of multicore hardware resources by the program code running on them is a bottleneck in many systems today. The times of simple von Neumann style sequential programming are gone – probably forever. Yet, manual parallelization of legacy software for complex multicores is extremely costly, risky, tedious, and error-prone.

With exponentially growing complexity in both application software and hardware platforms, the challenges are here to stay.