When using Amazon EC2 multi-core or multiple compute units, do you need to break up CPU work?

Question

If you have a CPU-intensive problem like data mining, do you need to break up the work for multiple cores/CPU's and create a multi-threaded application?

Or does EC2 break up the work among the multiple cores or CPU's for you?

Answer 1

If you have one process doing work, and that process is single-threaded, it will only occupy one virtual core.

Yes, you need to multi-thread (or divide the work between multiple running processes).