The release of Intel's Thread Building Blocks 2.0 (TBB) coincides
with the company's announcement to take it open source. Both
are significant announcements.
TBB is designed to make efficient use of multiple processing
cores in a symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) environment (see
"Multiple Threads Make Chunk Change" at www.electronicdesign.com, ED Online 13645). C/C++ applications utilize TBB syntactic extensions.
The latest version of TBB is based on extensive user feedback.
Its grain size setting allows hints to be given on how finely to
break up the algorithm. This works in conjunction with automatic,
hueristic tuning done by TBB so developers don't have to try to
tune their algorithms manually.
This version runs on more platforms, such as FreeBSD and
Solaris, but expect even more now that the source code is freely
available. All that's needed is a C/C++ compiler and knowledge
about the target operating system's multiprocessing support.
The move to open source is expected to increase both the use
of TBB as well as Intel's product flow. A supported and packaged
product will appeal to companies that have come to depend upon
TBB to accelerate their parallel programs.
For more, see our review of Intel Threading Building Blocks by James
Reinders, chief evangelist and director of marketing for Intel Software Development
Products, at ED Online 16537.
www.intel.com