oneAPI Threading Building Blocks (oneTBB; formerly Threading Building Blocks or TBB), is a

C++ C, or c, is the third letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''cee'' (pronounced ), plural ''cees''. History "C" ...

template Template may refer to: Tools * Die (manufacturing), used to cut or shape material * Mold, in a molding process * Stencil, a pattern or overlay used in graphic arts (drawing, painting, etc.) and sewing to replicate letters, shapes or designs ...

library developed by Intel for parallel programming on multi-core processors. Using TBB, a computation is broken down into tasks that can run in parallel. The library manages and schedules threads to execute these tasks.

Overview

A oneTBB program creates, synchronizes, and destroys graphs of dependent tasks according to ''algorithms'', i.e. high-level parallel programming paradigms (a.k.a. Algorithmic Skeletons). Tasks are then executed respecting graph dependencies. This approach groups TBB in a family of techniques for parallel programming aiming to decouple the programming from the particulars of the underlying machine. oneTBB implements

work stealing In parallel computing, work stealing is a scheduling strategy for multithreaded computer programs. It solves the problem of executing a ''dynamically multithreaded'' computation, one that can "spawn" new threads of execution, on a ''statically mul ...

to balance a parallel workload across available processing cores in order to increase core utilization and therefore scaling. 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, oneTBB 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. In a 2008 assessment of the work stealing implementation in TBB, researchers from Princeton University found that it was suboptimal for large numbers of processors cores, causing up to 47% of computing time spent in scheduling overhead when running certain benchmarks on a 32-core system. oneTBB, like the STL (and the part of the C++ standard library based on it), uses templates extensively. This has the advantage of low-overhead polymorphism, since templates are a compile-time construct which modern C++

compiler In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs th ...

s can largely optimize away. oneTBB is available commercially as a binary distribution with support,https://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-tbb Intel Threading Building Blocks Commercial Version Homepage and as open-source software in both source and binary forms. oneTBB does not provide guarantees of determinism or freedom from

data race A race condition or race hazard is the condition of an electronics, software, or other system where the system's substantive behavior is dependent on the sequence or timing of other uncontrollable events. It becomes a bug when one or more of ...

Library contents

oneTBB is a collection of components for parallel programming: * Basic algorithms: parallel_for, parallel_reduce, parallel_scan * Advanced algorithms: parallel_pipeline, parallel_sort *

Container A container is any receptacle or enclosure for holding a product used in storage, packaging, and transportation, including shipping. Things kept inside of a container are protected on several sides by being inside of its structure. The term ...

s: concurrent_queue, concurrent_priority_queue, concurrent_vector, concurrent_hash_map * Memory allocation: scalable_malloc, scalable_free, scalable_realloc, scalable_calloc, scalable_allocator, cache_aligned_allocator *

Mutual exclusion In computer science, mutual exclusion is a property of concurrency control, which is instituted for the purpose of preventing race conditions. It is the requirement that one thread of execution never enters a critical section while a concurren ...

: mutex, spin_mutex, queuing_mutex, spin_rw_mutex, queuing_rw_mutex, recursive_mutex * Timing: portable fine grained global time stamp * Task scheduler: direct access to control the creation and activation of tasks

Systems supported

The hardware, operating system, and software prerequisites for oneTBB.

Supported Hardware

* Intel Celeron processor family * Intel Core processor family * Intel Xeon processor family * Intel Xeon Phi processor family * Intel Atom processor family * Non-Intel processors compatible with the processors above

Supported Operating Systems

Systems with Microsoft Windows operating systems: * Microsoft Windows 10 * Microsoft Windows Server 2016 * Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Systems with Linux* operating systems: * Clear Linux * Amazon Linux 2 * CentOS 8 * Debian 10 * Fedora 34 * Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, 8 * SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 * Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, 20.04, 21.04 Systems with macOS operating systems: * macOS 10.15, 11.x Systems with Android operating systems: * Android 9

Supported Compilers

* Intel oneAPI DPC++/C++ Compiler * Intel C++ Compiler 19.0 and 19.1 version * Microsoft Visual C++ 14.2 (Microsoft Visual Studio 2019, Windows OS only) * GNU Compilers (gcc) 4.8.5 - 11.1.1 * GNU C Library (glibc) version 2.17 - 2.33 * Clang 6.0.0-12.0.0

Notes

References

* * * * *

External links

oneTBB Industry Specification
* * at Intel {{Parallel Computing Concurrent programming libraries Application programming interfaces C++ programming language family Generic programming Threads (computing) C++ libraries Intel software