Multi-Core Software

The Foundations for Scalable Multi-Core Software in Intel® Threading Building Blocks

RELATED WORK

The Intel® TBB task scheduler is inspired by the early Cilk scheduler [2, 3]. Cilk is a parallel extension of the C programming language that defines additional keywords and constructs. The Cilk project was a descendant of the Parallel Continuation Machine (PCM)/Threaded-C [13].

Both Cilk and the Intel TBB schedule lightweight tasks onto user threads. The Chare Kernel [14] is a portable set of functions that allows users to express parallelism in terms of small tasks (chares) with the runtime transparently managing resources. Unlike Intel TBB and Cilk, however, the Chare Kernel is targeted toward message passing machines.

Mainstream languages, such as those supported by the .NET CLR also recognize the need for thread pools, where users can submit tasks without the need to explicitly manage threads [15]. However, in the .NET CLR these thread pools are targeted at general-purpose applications and are not tuned for compute-intensive applications.

The McRT research program at Intel presented a software prototype of an integrated runtime library for large-scale chip-level multiprocessing (CMP) platforms [17], including a highly configurable, user-level scheduler. It can be used to realize a variety of co-operative scheduling strategies, including work stealing.

The design of the Intel TBB scalable allocator is based on contemporary research in scalable memory allocation [8, 9] and utilizes best-known design solutions; it has common roots with Hoard [8], LFMalloc, Vam [10], Streamflow [11] and other state-of-the-art concurrent and sequential allocators. The TBB scalable allocator is a productization of the scalable memory allocator developed as part of the McRT research program [7, 17].

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