Intel Threading Building Blocks - Implementation

Implementation

TBB implements task stealing to balance a parallel workload across available processing cores in order to increase core utilization and therefore scaling. The TBB task stealing model is similar to the work stealing model applied in Cilk. Initially, the workload is evenly divided among the available processor cores. If one core completes its work while other cores still have a significant amount of work in their queue, TBB reassigns some of the work from one of the busy cores to the idle core. This dynamic capability decouples the programmer from the machine, allowing applications written using the library to scale to utilize the available processing cores with no changes to the source code or the executable program file.

TBB, like the STL, uses templates extensively. This has the advantage of low-overhead polymorphism, since templates are a compile-time construct which modern C++ compilers can largely optimize away.

Intel TBB is available commercially as a binary distribution with support, and in open source in both source and binary forms.