Intel have released a beta version of their Parallel Studio development tools, much touted at the recent TechEd EMEA Developer event. The software integrates as a plug-in to Visual Studio, and aims to help software developers turn their single-threaded tools into high performance multi-threaded applications, taking advantage of todays multi-core chips.

The programming suite is targeted at C++ developers using Visual Studio 2005 and 2008, and comes with 4 distinct tools:

• Parallel Advisor, which add parallelism to existing code, and identifying potential conflicts
• Parallel Composer provides a set of libraries supporting an array of parallel programming models to speed up software development
• Parallel Inspector analyzes code for hard-to-find errors and helps to analyze the cause of races and deadlocks.
• Parallel Amplifier is a performance tuner that detects scaling limitations.

You can join the beta program for free on the Intel website.