Dev Tools Target Parallel Processing

Intel Cilk Plus

The Cilk Project started at MIT and was licensed by Cilk Arts that was purchased by Intel. The Intel Cilk++ SDK included the cilk_for, cilk_spawn, and cilk_sync keywords that are now supported by the Parallel Studio C/C++ compiler. These provide recursion and multithreading support. The latter uses a strict fork-join model with low overhead.

Intel Threading Building Blocks

Threading Building Blocks (TBB) provides a C++ template library and runtime for shared-memory parallism. It includes generic concurrent containers that eliminate user locking mechasnims. It can use lock-free or fine-grain locking in a scalable environment. There are exception-safe mutexes designed to address a variety of parallel programming needs. TBB also provides a thread local storage abstraction that supports traversal and reduction algorithms.

Intel Array Building Blocks

Array Building Blocks (ABB) is an adjunct to TBB. ABB provides a C++ template library for data parallism built around, obviously, arrays. ABB works with any compiler unlike the Cilk Plus extensions that are provided by Intel's C/C++ compiler. This makes ABB more portable. It can handle regular, irregular and nested data.

Intel's Thread Building Blocks was a major leap forward in parallel programming. Parallel Studio 2011 is another significant step forward. It takes advantage of existing multicore platforms and it will have a big impact as many core platforms become common place. Parallel Studio does not address all multicore environments but it does cut a wide swath through the parallel programming space.

• Intel
• Intel Parallel Studio
• Microsoft
• Microsoft Visual Studio
• Microsoft Parallel Computing
• Thread Building Blocks