Characterizing and improving the performance of Intel Threading Building Blocks

Abstract— The Intel Threading Building Blocks (TBB) runtime library [1] is a popular C++ parallelization environment [2][3] that offers a set of methods and templates for creating parallel applications. Through support of parallel tasks rather than parallel threads, the TBB runtime library offers improved performance scalability by dynamically redistributing parallel tasks across available processors. This not only creates more scalable, portable parallel applications, but also increases programming productivity by allowing programmers to focus their efforts on identifying concurrency rather than worrying about its management. While many applications benefit from dynamic management of parallelism, dynamic management carries parallelization overhead that increases with increasing core counts and decreasing task sizes. Understanding the sources of these overheads and their implications on application performance can help programmers make more efficient use of available parallelism. C...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: IISWC
• Authors: Gilberto Contreras, Margaret Martonosi
• Keywords: Core Counts, IISWC 2008, Intel Threading Building Blocks, Operating Systems, Overheads