It has been designed by Tucker Taft, the CTO and chairman of the Boston-based software company SofCheck. Taft has taught and disseminated encyclopaedic knowledge at Harvard University, and worked tirelessly to improve the Ada language for 20 years being an  industry leader in compiler construction and programming language design.

Over the last few years reports  Technology Review programmers have run up against the microchip makers shift to increase the power of processor cores (handling  data and instructions) by adding more cores to a single chip.  Intel's i3 and i7 processors have two and four cores, respectively.

This presents a major challenge. Most programming languages were designed for single-core chips. It can be difficult to divide tasks up and send them to each core in parallel.  Without care, this causes errors in the way that each core in the chip access the shared sections of memory.

Parasail is intended to avoid the pitfalls that typically happen when working with multicore chips. To a programmer, it looks like a modified form of C or C++, two leading languages.

The difference is that it automatically splits a program into thousands of smaller tasks that can then be spread across cores, pico-threading, which maximizes the number of tasks being carried out in parallel, regardless of the number of cores.

ParaSail also  automatically does the debugging which makes code safer. "Everything is done in parallel by default, unless you tell it otherwise," Taft says.

Over the next decade, the number of cores on computer chips is expected to increase even further. "There are some machines out there with dozens or hundreds of cores now," says Taft.

ParaSail uses a number of other tricks,  drawing on languages developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s for supercomputers running many individual computer chips networked together.

"The design of the language itself is essentially complete," says Taft, who presented language details at  O'Reilly Open Source Convention. "The first version of the compiler will be released in the next month or so." It  will work on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Microsoft and Intel are putting $20m into adapting existing languages for multicore processors, so it's open whether ParaSail will be widely adopted. "There are a lot of people chipping away at the problem, taking existing languages and trying to make them better at handling parallel processing," says Taft.

But he already has a proven track record in the world of computer language development, says Denis Nicole (right) of the Dependable Systems and Software Engineering Group at Southampton University.

"But," adds Nicole, "it usually takes companies the size of Sun to push new languages on the community."