(Electronic Design): Clusters with thousands of cores are standard fare these days. Chips with hundreds of cores can be found in the average desktop and laptop PC in the form of GPUs that are now being used for computational chores in addition to their graphical work. Programming the current crop of server, desktop, and laptop systems is relatively straightforward. However, things get a bit more challenging as the number of cores increases by an order of one or two magnitudes. For example, servers may consist of a few multicore chips providing a symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) system with dozens of cores supporting virtual machines (VM) allowing a system to run hundreds of VMs. Full Article