Thread: How difficult is parallel programming in C?

I know some graduate physics students who are writing research programs in C. These programs involve massive calculations.

I am trying to choose a configuration for a new workstation for these students. They tell me, however, that they don't want a multicore processor because it is too difficult to write a program utilizing more than one processor, they don't want to write parallel.

This seems like a problem to me because I don't know any workstation config that doesn't use multiple processors. Is it really that hard to write a C program to utilize 2, 4 or 8 processors? (I've never tired it)

Thanks