Threading Building Blocks Contest Winners

By Kevin Farnham (107 posts) on September 21, 2007 at 9:08 am

The Threading Building Blocks Contest winners have been announced. The grand prize winner is Vincent Tan, who submitted his par2cmdline .4 with Intel TBB project. Vincent is a C++ programmer from Australia with more than 10 years of experience "writing cross-platform code for the Mac OS (classic and X) and Windows (win32) platforms."

par2cmdline is:

a utility to create and repair data files using Reed Solomon coding. par2 parity archives are commonly used on Usenet postings to allow corrupted postings to be repaired instead of needing the original poster to repost the corrupted file(s).

par2cmdline is licensed under GPLv2 (or later).

Here's what Vincent had to say about Threading Building Blocks:

"I was very impressed with the TBB because anything that allows a programmer to concentrate on structuring their code at a high level, without having to "pop the hood" to work at a low level, is something that will always increase a programmer's productivity. The Intel TBB does that with a set of easy-to-use and easy-to-understand classes and functions that cover relevant code constructs (parallel_for), thread safe versions of the STL collections (concurrent_hash_map and concurrent_vector), and thread safe plain-old-data wrappers (atomic).

"There's one other benefit from using the TBB: the modified code still resembles the original code to a large degree. If thread creation and scheduling code had been added to the original code, as a traditional modification might have done, the end result would probably be a code base that no longer closely resembled the original version, because the code to do threading would "pollute" the source code, making it harder to see the "meat" of the original code, which would make it harder to maintain or modify. Because the Intel TBB's classes and functions resemble the serial versions, it's much easier to see and reason about the modified code."

More winning contest entries

Three additional projects were also declared winners:

the Hierarchically Tiled Arrays project (Basilio Fraguela) implements a class designed to facilitate the writing of programs based on tiles in object-oriented languages;
Yetisim (AJ Guillon) is a discrete event simulation library for C++;
the Mandelbrot Set on Core Duo with TBB submission (Wei Sun) demonstrated application of TBB's parallel_for() in a Mandelbrot application.

Conclusion

Given the short amount of time people had to work on their projects (the contest was announced at OSCON in late July, and ended on August 31), and the time it takes to understand and apply a new technology such as TBB, it's amazing to me that there were this many high-quality contest submissions. I'll be talking with the contest winners and also taking a closer look at their projects in the coming weeks.

Kevin Farnham
O'Reilly Media
TBB Open Source Community