Just a side-note (I'm not an Intel employee, but I'ven't seen much Intel awareness re: their tooling here [they're fairly bad at reaching out to this community,

Just a side-note (I'm not an Intel employee, but I'ven't seen much Intel awareness re: their tooling here [they're fairly bad at reaching out to this community, but they have tons of free tools available that'll save your team money if you're doing anything that's not IO bound]): * http://ispc.github.io/ http://ispc.github.io/ -> An Intel front-end compiler for "SPMD" that targets LLVM, which has proven to be useful. * PIN -> Dynamic analysis, free. Think DTrace and Valgrind on steroids. (Not open source, I'll take what I can get) * ICC -> Their compiler suite gets little love on HN (though there aren't many engineers who really write computationally intensive stuff here, or if they do I suppose they just throw Amazon instances at it), but it's so cheap for what you get. Such an extensive tooling set out of the box at around the pricing of VS (both of which are well under 5k for 1 seat re: their highest version). My team has done a few jobs where we've jumped in using Intel tooling and both shifted and tightened the 1st-3rd quadrant computational time by literally 3-5x and 10-20x respectively by basically just using the Intel tooling and being fairly familiar with it. Shameless plug & all ;)