**4. Message-passing on the chip**

Since the beginning of the multicore era, parallel processing has become prevalent across-the-board. While previously parallel working processors almost exclusively belonged to the domain of datacenters, today nearly every common desktop PC is already a multiprocessor system. And according to Moore's Law, the number of compute cores per system will continue to grow on both the low end and the high end. Already at this stage, there exist multicore architectures with up to twelve entire cores. However, this high degree of parallelism poses an enormous challenge in particular for the software layers.
