On the contrary, I expected my perl scripts to run just as they did on my single-processor box on my multicore system, and that I'd have the option to add threads to them down the road if I so choose. I was confused when perl seemed to automatically be doing some kind of internal threaded, but as it turns out, it was an unrelated problem (see my post above). I'm happy to see that this works the way I would expect it to. Although I don't consider myself a programmer, I have experience writing massively parallel C code for cluster/supercomputers, so the concept of threading is not entirely foreign to me.