COMPUTATIONAL RESEARCH in BOSTON and BEYOND (CRIBB)

Date	Aug. 24, 2010
Speaker	Arch Robison (INTEL®)
Topic	Introduction to Intel® Threading Building Blocks
Abstract:	Intel® Threading Building Blocks (Intel® TBB) is a commercially supported open-source C++ template library for parallel programming of shared-memory hardware. TBB stresses a scalable and nestable approach to parallelism, which is critical for successful multi-core modular software. I will focus on the generic algorithms portion of TBB, which enable programmers to express parallelism at a high level, without becoming tangled in low level details of threading. For example, TBB's parallel_reduce template lets the programmer specify a parallel reduction over any recursively divisible iteration space, using any associative operation. I'll also touch on TBB's concurrent containers, which simplify common patterns of sharing between parallel activities. TBB rounds out its concurrency support with critical low-level components such as locks, atomic operations, and a scalable memory allocator.

Acknowledgements

We thank the generous support of MIT IS&T, CSAIL, and the Department of Mathematics for their support of this series.