India Needs More Parallel Programming Awareness, Intel Says

BANGALORE, India — With an estimated 1.22 million strong software developer community, India is a key software development destination and an emerging hotbed for software products. But India has yet to understand the need for programming in parallel to take advantage of multi-core processing systems that are increasingly in shipment today, according to No. 1 chip maker Intel Corp.

Because India is a key market for the company's software (threading) products, Intel has started engaging software development firms and engineering institutes here in an effort to promote awareness of parallel programming.

"A lot more needs to be done," said Narendra Bhandari, director of SSG global developer relations division at Intel's Indian subsidiary. "Awareness will start kicking in through 2007, but we expect a product developed in the new method to be out only 15 months later. We are considering many options of speeding up knowledge of the new programming method and may even set up labs in some of the software firms in India to do so."

"Developers working closer to the platform need to be worried [about parallel programming], especially those into benchmarking and architecting with the shipment of multi-core machines growing by the day," said Phil De La Zerda, director of sales and business development at Intel's developer products division. "We hope competitive pressures will drive parallelism. But we expect the threading tools and other software products to get us big revenues. India is really a key market for such products."