With processor core counts doubling every 18-24 months and penetrating all markets from high-end servers in supercomputers to desktops and laptops down to even mobile phones, we sit at the dawn of a world of ubiquitous parallelism, one where extracting performance via parallelism is paramount. That is, the "free lunch" to better performance, where programmers could rely on substantial increases in single-threaded performance to improve software, is over. The burden falls on developers to exploit parallel hardware for performance gains.