“Future generations of chips will provide dozens or even hundreds of cores. Writing appli-
cations that benefit from the massive computational power offered by these chips is not
going to be an easy task for mainstream programmers who are used to sequential algo-
rithms rather than parallel ones.
“Intel’s TBB is providing a big step forward into this long path, and what is better, all in the
C++ framework.”
— Eduard Ayguade, Barcelona Supercomputer Center, Technical
University of Catalunya
“Intel’s TBB is to parallel programming what STL was to plain C++. Generic program-
ming with STL dramatically improved C++ programming productivity. TBB offers a
generic parallel programming model that hides the complexity of concurrency control. It
lowers the barrier to parallel code development, enabling efficient use of ‘killer’ multi-
cores.”
— Lawrence Rauchwerger, Texas A&M University, Inventor of STAPL
“For the last eighteen years the denizens of the thinly populated world of supercomputers
have been looking for a way to write really pretty and practical parallel programs in C++.
We knew templates and generic programming had to be part of the answer, but it took
the arrival of multi-core (and soon many-core) processors to create a fundamental change
in the computing landscape. Parallelism is now going to be everyday stuff.
“Every C++ programmer is going to need to think about concurrency and parallelism and
Threading Building Blocks provides the right abstractions for them to do it correctly.
“This book is not just a discussion of a C++ template library. It provides a lovely and in-
depth overview of much of what we have learned about parallel computing in the last 25
years. It could be a great textbook for a course on parallel programming.”
— Dennis Gannon, Science Director, Pervasive Technology Labs at
Indiana University, former head of DARPA’s High Performance
Computing (HPC++) project, and steering committee member of the
Global Grid Forum
“TBB hits the application developer’s sweet spot with such advantages as uniprocessor
performance, parallel scalability, C++ programming well beyond OpenMP, compatibility
with OpenMP and hand threads, Intel Threading Tools support for performance and
confidence, and openness to the software development community. TBB avoids several
constraints surrounding the sweet spot: language extension risks, specific compiler depen-
dences and hand-threading complexities.
“This book should make developers productive without a steep training curve, and the
applications they produce should be of high quality and performance.”
— David Kuck, Intel Fellow, founder of KAI and former director of the
Center for Supercomputing Research and Development
