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A month ago, Charles Leiserson wrote a post on the Multicore Blog at Cilk Arts called "The Folly of DIY Multithreading." He provides pthreads and Cilk implementations of a parallel fib() function and offers great advice in his article: "Building a concurrency platform from scratch is a mountain to climb." Professor Leiserson mentioned the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine in his post. In 6.033, every MIT CS student learns about the how thread interlocking can lead to confuddling system errors that can kill people. Clearly threads should be considered harmful. Professor Leiserson argues that using a multithreading platform like Cilk will help you address these harmful side-effects of multithreading.