Intel Threading Building Blocks

Preface

Multi-core processors have made parallel programming a topic of interest for every programmer. Computer systems without multiple processor cores have become relatively rare. This book is about a solution for C++ programmers that does not ask you to abandon C++ or require the direct use of raw, native threads.

This book introduces Intel Threading Building Blocks. Threading Building Blocks is a C++ template library for parallelism that extends C++ by abstracting away thread management and allowing straightforward parallel programming. To use the library, you specify tasks, not threads, and let the library map tasks onto threads in an efficient manner. This has many advantages in a world where you need your application to survive as more processor cores become available.

Threading Building Blocks will enable you to specify parallelism far more conveniently than using raw threads, while improving performance, portability, and scalability.

Tip

You can download a copy of Intel Threading Building Blocks from http://www.threadingbuildingblocks.org or http://www.intel.com/software/ products.