For a number of years, the great processor race has been for speed. The speed race is finished. Now the race is to see how many processors can be fit on one chip. The currently available chips can have from two to four processor cores on one chip. A research chip exists that has 80 cores on one chip. If you are using servers with four processor cores, the operating system will handle spreading out the tasks, but you're not really taking advantage of the processing power that exists. We're still writing software for one process at a time. To take advantage, we'll need to reengineer our policy administration systems and adopt parallel programming techniques to move forward.

We're handling policies with multiple risks that are presently being processed single file. One complicated risk will slow down the processing of the entire policy. It seems natural to divide the processing of the risks out and run them simultaneously. Most developers of policy administration systems are not trained extensively on parallel processing; at most, it's one assignment in college. The languages used to develop the policy administration system will need to adapt as well. XML processing would be improved if you could process nodes concurrently.

The entire development process will need to change to meet the coming challenges. We'll need new methodologies to debug our applications. The tools and languages we use will need to change, or we'll have to adopt new tools and languages. We can't just sit on the sidelines and do nothing. In the very near future, we'll have customers that have servers with at least 64 cores running. We had better be able to explain to them how we're taking advantage of the processing power.

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