I have read many of the good questions and answers around multi-core programming how-tos etc. I am familiar with concurrency, IPC, MPI etc but what I need is advice on how to measure speed-up which will help in making a business case of spending the time to write such code. Please don't answer with "well run it with single-core code then multi-core code and figure out the difference". This is neither a scientific nor a reliable way to measure performance improvement. If you know of tools that will do some of the heavy lifting please mention them. Answers pertaining to methodology will be more fitting but listing tools is ok as well.