SICSA multicore challenge editorial preface

This special issue reports on the SICSA multicore challenge, which commenced in 2010 and remains an ongoing activity. The aim is to produce a comparative evaluation of a range of standard parallel programming tools and techniques on a representative set of parallelizable problems, executing on commodity multicore platforms.<p></p> In this introductory article, we outline contemporary multicore computing trends that give rise to the challenge in Section 2. Then, we describe the specific motivation for the challenge in Section 3. We summarize the parallelizable problem selected for implementation in the second challenge phase, the N-body problem, and studied in the papers in this special issue in Section 4. Finally in Section 5, we summarize the participation in challenge activities to date and give an overview of the papers that were produced by challenge participants that appear in this particular special issue.<p></p> We intend this special issue to present the main lessons learnt from the challenge, providing material of general relevance for multicore application developers and researchers.<p></p&gt