Intel Threading Building Blocks

Benefits

As mentioned, the goal of a programmer in a modern computing environment is scalability: to take advantage of both cores on a dual-core processor, all four cores on a quad-core processor, and so on. Threading Building Blocks makes writing scalable applications much easier than it is with traditional threading packages.

There are a variety of approaches to parallel programming, ranging from the use of platform-dependent threading primitives to exotic new languages. The advantage of Threading Building Blocks is that it works at a higher level than raw threads, yet does not require exotic languages or compilers. You can use it with any compiler supporting ISO C++. This library differs from typical threading packages in these ways:

Threading Building Blocks enables you to specify tasks instead of threads

Most threading packages require you to create, join, and manage threads. Programming directly in terms of threads can be tedious and can lead to inefficient programs because threads are low-level, heavy constructs that are close to the hardware. Direct programming with threads forces you to do the work to efficiently map logical tasks onto threads. In contrast, the Threading Building Blocks runtime library automatically schedules tasks onto threads in a way that makes efficient use of processor resources. The runtime is very effective at load balancing the many tasks you will be specifying.

By avoiding programming in a raw native thread model, you can expect better portability, ...