Intel® TBB

Intel^® Threading Building Blocks (Intel^® TBB) is an award-winning C++ template library that abstracts threads to tasks to create reliable, portable, and scalable parallel applications. Just as the C++ Standard Template Library (STL) extends the core language, Intel TBB offers C++ users a higher level abstraction for parallelism. To implement Intel TBB, developers use familiar C++ templates and coding style, leaving low-level threading details to the library. It is also portable between architectures and operating systems. With Intel TBB, developers get the benefits of faster programming, scalable performance, and easier to maintain code.

Available as Open Source

• Enhanced Productivity - Intel TBB uses task-based abstractions that make it easier to get scalable and reliable parallel applications

• Comprehensive - Intel TBB provides a set of components needed to implement parallel code

• Future-proof Applications - Application performance automatically improves as processor core count increases

• Portability - Intel TBB runs on a wide variety of OS's and platforms

Intel® Parallel Composer 2011 includes compiler options that optimize for instruction sets that are available in both Intel® and non-Intel microprocessors (for example SIMD instruction sets), but do not optimize equally for non-Intel microprocessors. In addition, certain compiler options for Intel® Parallel Composer 2011 are reserved for Intel microprocessors. For a detailed description of these compiler options, including the instruction sets they implicate, please refer to "Intel® Parallel Composer 2011 Documentation > Intel® C++ Compiler 12.0 User and Reference Guides > Compiler Options." Many library routines that are part of Intel® Parallel Composer 2011 are more highly optimized for Intel microprocessors than for other microprocessors. While the compilers and libraries in Intel® Parallel Composer 2011 offer optimizations for both Intel and Intel-compatible microprocessors, depending on the options you select, your code and other factors, you likely will get extra performance on Intel microprocessors.

While the paragraph above describes the basic optimization approach for Intel® Parallel Composer 2011, with respect to Intel's compilers and associated libraries as a whole, Intel® Parallel Composer 2011 may or may not optimize to the same degree for non-Intel microprocessors for optimizations that are not unique to Intel microprocessors. These optimizations include Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (Intel® SSE2), Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 (Intel® SSE3), and Supplemental Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 (Intel® SSSE3) instruction sets and other optimizations. Intel does not guarantee the availability, functionality, or effectiveness of any optimization on microprocessors not manufactured by Intel. Microprocessor-dependent optimizations in this product are intended for use with Intel microprocessors.

Intel recommends that you evaluate other compilers to determine which best meet your requirements.

Intel TBB uses task-based abstractions that make it easier to get scalable and reliable parallel applications with fewer lines of code. Task-based algorithms, containers, and synchronization primitives simplify parallel application development.

Side-by-side comparison on the left shows equivalent Windows* thread functionality that requires significantly more code to make a 2D ray tracing program, Tachyon, correctly threaded. Linux* and Mac OS X* developers can expect similar results.

Intel TBB provides a suite of components that help simplify and speed development of scalable, high performance parallel applications. It provides parallel algorithms, concurrent containers, task scheduling, scalable memory allocation, and synchronization primitives. In addition, the runtime library provides an optimal-size thread pool; task granularity and performance-oriented scheduling; automatic load balancing through task stealing; and cache efficiency and memory reuse. Italic text in table means “new function

Application performance automatically improves as processor core count increases by using abstract tasks. Sophisticated task scheduler dynamically maps tasks to threads to balance the load among available cores, preserve cache locality, and maximize parallel performance.

Excellent scalability and improved performance using Intel TBB versus a serial implementation. Windows and Mac OS X developers can expect similar results.

Intel TBB is validated and commercially supported on Windows*, Linux*, and Mac OS* platforms. It is also available on FreeBSD*, IA Solaris*, XBox* 360, and PowerPC-based systems via the open source community. Organizations can expand their customer base by using a production-ready, open solution for parallelism that is available on a broad range of platforms.