README

Multicore SWARM (Software and Algorithms for Running on Multicore
Processors) is an open source library for developing efficient and
portable implementations that make use of multi-core
processors. SWARM's development began in 1994 by David A. Bader.

(C) 1994-2007, David A. Bader, Georgia Institute of Technology
               http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~bader

Since the inception of the desktop computer, performance of software
has improved at an exponential rate, primarily driven by the steady
technological improvements of microprocessors. Due to fundamental
physical limitations and power constraints, we are now witnessing a
radical change in commodity microprocessor architecture, to multi-core
designs. Continued performance now requires the exploitation of
concurrency at the algorithmic level. Automatic methods for detecting
concurrency from sequential codes, for example with parallelizing
compilers, have been successful in only a few regular cases. For
several decades, a niche community mainly in scientific and technical
computing has developed parallel computing methodologies; however,
this community typically relies on specially-trained heroic
programmers due to the complex programming methodologies that are
often difficult to comprehend and use, even for the most sophisticated
scientific programmer. We have designed a parallel programming
methodology (library-based) for commodity multi-core processors by
providing a productive, easy-to-use package. The main developer (David
A. Bader) is a computer science professor at Georgia Tech, a pioneer
in the area of parallel algorithm engineering techniques, and has
extensive experience designing the world’s fastest parallel algorithms
for shared memory, symmetric multiprocessor, and multithreaded
architectures. In this project, he disseminates his portable and
efficient library of basic primitives that fully exploit multi-core
processors.