New parallel programming support added to Visual Studio 2008

Microsoft has updated its popular programming suite, Visual Studio 2008, to incorporate better support for parallel programming. Among other capabilities, it will now include support for debugging the Message Passing Interface (MPI) protocol--the APIs found in MPI is designed to facilitate communication between large clusters of computers. All the new tools will be found in Visual Studio 2010 by default.

Describing the new capabilities to debug MPI, Microsoft has a blog post which describes how programmers can now "select a cluster head node, how many cores you want, and hit F5 to debug your MPI program."

Programming parallel applications is much trickier and challenging than monolithic or even traditional client-server software. Microsoft hopes to make this easier, and among other initiatives is continuing its work on a new parallel programming language called Axum.

With massive multi-cored processors set to be the de facto standard moving forward, the ability to quickly write working and well-behaved parallel software is becoming more important than ever.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at eWeek
- check out this article at Somasegar's WebLog

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