American computer researchers say they have developed new software which makes programming of multi-processor machines much easier.

“With older, single-processor systems, computers behave exactly the same way as long as you give the same commands. Today’s computers are non-deterministic,” says Luis Ceze, computer science and engineering prof at the University of Washington, Washington. “Even if you give the same set of commands, you might get a different result.”

Today’s consumer dual-core systems may not be that hard to figure out, but according to Ceze and his colleagues it gets harder and harder to design reliable code as the number of cores goes up. At the highest end of the scale, with the hundred-thousand-core monsters of the heavyweight supercomputing league, “concurrency bugs” - where changes in wire temperature or other hard-to-predict shifts can alter the sequence in which information arrives and gets processed - can be a nightmare.

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