Microsoft's working on automated, optimized multi-core programming tools

Simone Chiaretta has an interesting post on a new library in development from Microsoft to automate multi-core programming:

The library uses some advanced algorithms to split the task among the available cores, dynamically adapting to the workload and to the particular machine. For example on single-processor machines the loop will be executed sequentially, but on dual-core machines the library will use two worker threads.

This looks along the lines of high-performance Fortran, and not currently aimed at competing with tools such as Hadoop. However, once the library is up and running to automatically parallelize across one multi-core processor, it's certainly possible it could be improved to parallelize across multiple machines. Interesting to know, since .NET is such a nice development platform and, as Chiaretta correctly notes, our software future will be coming at us in parallel.