Shared-memory multi-core architectures are becoming increasingly popular. While their parallelism and peak performance is ever increasing, their efficiency is often disappointing due to memory fence overheads. In this paper we present FastFlow, a programming methodology based on lock-free queues explicitly designed for programming streaming applications on multi-cores. The potential of FastFlow is evaluated on micro-benchmarks and on the Smith-Waterman sequence alignment application, which exhibits a substantial speedup against the state-of-the-art multi-threaded implementation (SWPS3 x86/SSE2).