As with all of the projects that we are fortunate to be involved with these days, we could not have made it to the finish line without the help, suggestions, constructive criticisms, and resources of our colleagues and friends. In particular, we would like to thank the YSU student chapter of the ACM for suffering through some of the early versions and rough drafts of the material presented in this book. They were single — handedly responsible for sending us back to the drawing board on more than one occasion. We are indebted to Shaun Canavan for providing us with release time for this project and for picking up the slack on several of the colloquiums and conferences where we had major responsibilities but not enough time to execute them. We would like to thank Dr. Alina Lazar for excusing us from many missed meetings and deadlines. A big thanks goes to Trevor Watkins from Z Group who gave us free and unrestricted access to Site B and for helping us with Linux and the Cell processors. We owe much gratitude to Brian Nelson from YSU who patiently answered many of our pesky questions about the UltraSparc T1 Sun — Fire — T200 and for also giving us enough disk quota and security clearance to get the job done! Thanks to Dr. Kriss Schueller for his inspiring presentation to our group on multicore computing and the UltraSparc T1 and also for agreeing to review some of the early versions of the hardware material that we present in the book. A special thanks goes to CTEST Labs who gave us full access to their Pantheon cluster, multicore Opterons, and multicore Macs. The CTEST Pantheon provided the primary testing resources for much of the material in this book. We would like to thank Jacqueline Hansson from IEEE for her help with the POSIX standards material. Thanks to Greg from Intel who helped us get off to a good start on the Intel Thread Building Blocks library. Thanks to Carole McClendon who saw value in this project from the very beginning and who encouraged us to see it through. A book of this nature is not possible without the input from technical editors, development editors, and reviewers. We have to extend much appreciation to Kevin Kent, our senior development editor, who helped sculpt the material and for providing us with very useful criticism and input throughout the project; to Carol Long, our executive acquisitions editor for her support as we tip — toed past our share of deadlines; to Andrew Moore, our technical editor; and to Christine O'Connor, our production editor.