Skip to Main Content
Intel Threading Building Blocks
book

Intel Threading Building Blocks

by James Reinders
July 2007
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
332 pages
10h 4m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Intel Threading Building Blocks

Key Steps to Success

Our experience using Threading Building Blocks has helped us create a simple fivestep program to success that has been working well for us at Intel:

  1. Think Parallel. Understand where parallelism is and how you want to express it in terms of tasks.

  2. Design using relaxed sequential execution (see the next section). Do not introduce anything in your code that will not allow single-thread execution.

  3. When possible, use:

    1. The algorithm templates (Chapter 3 and Chapter 4) instead of raw tasks

    2. The algorithm templates instead of locking

    3. A scalable memory allocator (not malloc or the default new functions)

  4. Debug:

    1. Debug the single-thread version first (enabled by step 1). Do this by giving tbb::task_scheduler_init a parameter value of 1.

    2. After that, try two threads, then four threads, and so on. It doesn’t hurt to test with many more threads in case there are races lurking that might be hidden by unfair scheduling on a few processors.

    3. Use the Intel Thread Checker to check for race conditions, even if the program is working.

  5. Look for tuning opportunities using the Intel Thread Profiler, which can give you insight into stalls induced by synchronization.

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Intel® Xeon Phi™ Coprocessor Architecture and Tools: The Guide for Application Developers

Intel® Xeon Phi™ Coprocessor Architecture and Tools: The Guide for Application Developers

Rezaur Rahman

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596514808Errata Page