Parallel Computing - NY Times Article and the .NET Parallel Extensions.
A timely article appeared in the NY Times today (link) regarding Parallel computing as the next key factor in keeping up with the ever demanding needs of getting things done faster. As the article points out, the single CPU processor can't address our needs for faster computational capability without literally burning up or melting. I've seen this personally with Vista and the stressing of the GPU on some older notebooks.
So, what's the solution, well, it's been around for decades, it's just now getting great support in .NET with the Parallel Extensions to .NET now in CTP form
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E848DC1D-5BE3-4941-8705-024BC7F180BA&displaylang=en
Check out the teams Blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/pfxteam/
More importantly, check out Daniel Moth's screen casts (this guy rocks)...
http://www.danielmoth.com/Blog/2007/11/parallel-extensions.html
Now, what application will benefit from parallel processing? Physics still rules here, and all the issues of cross thread synchronization, concurrency, race conditions, deadlock, etc. - well, they all still exists. But the library is making some of the decisions (partitioning, communication, synchronization, etc.) for you and optimizing based upon the task at hand vs. the hardware present.
One thing to note is they've done tight integration with LINQ, which can provide strong candidates for parallel tasks against sets where the greatest results are gained with in memory processing.