[scott_s]

Perhaps you're being a bit dismissive, but Cilk is an option people should explore. For those interested in how such things work, there are extensive papers from the Cilk group at MIT: http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/papers.html

In particular, I recommend "Cilk: An Efficient Multithreaded Runtime System" (http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/papers/PPoPP95.pdf) and "The Implementation of the Cilk-5 Multithreaded Language" (http://supertech.csail.mit.edu/papers/cilk5.pdf).