[ale] OT: Multi-core Utilization

[Jeff Hubbs]

My *practical* experience has a hole in it when it comes to developing 
software to efficiently use multiple cores in a machine.

If I'm writing code in the likes of C++, Python, or Fortran 
(acknowledging that I've got a range of programming paradigms there) and 
let's say that I'm subtracting two 2-D arrays of floating point numbers 
from one another element-wise, how is it that the operation gets blown 
across multiple CPU cores in an efficient way, if at all?  Bear in mind 
that if this is done in Fortran, it's done in a pair of nested do-loops 
so unless the compiler is really smart, that becomes a serial operation.