In this paper, we present some of the challenges and opportunities in software development based on the current hardware trends and the impact of massive parallelism on both the software and hardware industry. We indicate some of the approaches that can enable software development to effectively exploit the many-core architectures. Some of these include encapsulating domain-specific knowledge in reusable components, such as libraries, integrating concurrency with languages, and supporting explicit declarations to help compilers and operating system schedulers. Tighter interaction between software and underlying hardware is required to build scalable and portable applications with predictable performance and higher power-efficiency. Overall, many-core computing provides us opportunities to enable new application scenarios that support enhanced functionality and a richer experience for the user on commodity hardware.

As companies migrate from a centralized to a distributed computing environment, the administration and management of security policies, in particular authorization policies, is becoming an increasingly difficult task. The paper considers the design of an authorization system that is suitable for distributed applications. It discusses the architectural design principles, describes the constructs of the authorization policy language and outlines the authorization service and components involved. The paper gives some example policy specifications and illustrates how privileges are specified and evaluated, as well as how privilege resolutions are achieved.