Threads Make The Move To Open Source

Sept. 13, 2007

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 multip

William G. Wong

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

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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