Welcome to Threading Building Blocks.org!

Intel® Threading Building Blocks (Intel TBB) offers a rich and complete approach to expressing parallelism in a C++ program. It is a library that helps you take advantage of multi-core processor performance without having to be a threading expert. Intel TBB is not just a threads-replacement library. It represents a higher-level, task-based parallelism that abstracts platform details and threading mechanisms for scalability and performance. 

September 8, 2011: Intel® Threading Building Blocks 4.0 Available Today!

Intel(R) TBB 4.0 introduces several new features:
Flow Graph: API Extends applicability of IntelR TBB to event-driven/reactive programming models
Concurrent Unordered Set: Thread-safe container to store and access user objects
Memory Pools: Enables greater flexibility and performance by getting thread-safe and scalable object allocation
Generic GCC* Atomics Support: Library portability enables development of IntelR TBB-based solutions on a broader range of platforms
Task and task group priorities: Provides ability to specify task execution order based on three priority levels (low, normal, and high)
Concurrent Priority Queue: A queue that allows pulling data out in a user-defined priority order

Questions, feedback, and contributions on the new features are always welcomed. 
Download Intel TBB 4.0 today! 

More information about the release:

• What's New
• Features & Benefits
• Commercial Version

 April 4, 2011: OPEN CASCADE and Intel TBB

• Learn more in Roman Lygin's blog: TBB adoption in CAD: Technical Insights
• Read OPEN CASCADE's original press release and case study here.

March 25, 2011:  Announcing the Task Priority CP Feature

Today we are happy to introduce the latest CP features: Task, and Task Group, Priority.  This set of features is available today in Intel TBB 3.0 Update 6.

• Read about Task Priorities in Andrey Marochko's blog: Task and task group priorities in TBB
• Download Intel TBB 3.0 Update 6

December 23, 2010: Announcing the Graph Community Preview (CP) Feature

Following on the recent introduction of the first CP feature, the concurrent_priority_queue, the Intel TBB team introduced a new feature today in Intel TBB 3.0 Update 5 -- the Graph interface.  The Graph interface is the culmination of years of work to meet the needs of developers who would like to utilize Intel TBB for irregular problem types like those that use events or message passing.  We are particularly interested in community feedback on whether the graph is helping produce more elegant and high performing implementations in real world applications.  As always, community questions, feedback, and contributions are welcome.

• Read about the Graph interface and its many uses in Mike Voss’s blog series: Using the Intel® Threading Building Blocks Graph Community Preview Feature
• Download Intel TBB 3.0 Update 5

December 8, 2010: Announcing Community Preview (CP) Features

The Intel TBB team is happy to introduce the use of Community Preview (CP) features into Intel TBB today.  CP features are a great way for Intel to show new and interesting capabilities to our community and customers before they have been finalized.  As part of our commitment to openness with all of the Intel® Parallel Building Blocks technologies, we want our users to know what we are working on to make Intel TBB better.  We also want to gain your feedback on upcoming features so that we can make sure we continue to meet your needs today and in the future.

These features are fully tested but are not officially supported or necessarily fully documented.  Given the early nature of these features, we don’t guarantee that they won’t be removed or modified in ways that break compatibility with pre-production versions.  In addition, they are turned off by default so they won’t impact your application unless you want to give them a try.  We look forward to hearing your response in the forum to our first CP feature, the Concurrent Priority Queue, and to the use of CP features in general.

• Read about the Community Preview features in Victoria Gromova's knowledge base article: Intel® Threading Building Blocks: Community Preview Features 
• Read about the Concurrent Priority Queue in Terry Wilmarth's blog: Intel® Threading Building Blocks Version 3.0 Update 4 showcases its first Community Preview feature: Concurrent Priority Queue
• Download Intel TBB 3.0 Update 4

May 4, 2010: Intel® Threading Building Blocks 3.0 Available Today 

The new commercial aligned open source version of TBB 3.0 is available for download now.  If you need the commercial version of TBB 3.0 it is available for evaluation and purchase today as well.  You can learn more about the release in Terry Wilmarth's and James Reinders' blogs on the Intel Software Network.

• Read the announcement at the Intel Press Room
• Read about the history of TBB and the exciting changes available in TBB 3.0 in James Reinders' blog: TBB 3.0: New (today) Version of Intel Threading Building Blocks
• Read the summary of new features in Terry Wilmarth's blog: What's New in Intel® Threading Building Blocks 3.0
• Read about how to move from TBB 2.2 to TBB 3.0 in Arch Robison's blog: Transitioning to TBB 3.0

Latest News

PC Games Hardware: Ric Broadhurst of Creative Assembly talks about using TBB in Napoleon: Total War - Better performance coming with the Empire add-on? 

Intel® Software Network: In Optimizing Without Breaking a Sweat authors John O'Neill, Alex Wells, and Matt Walsh show how to use TBB 2.2's automatic memory allocator replacement to get great performance improvements in DreamWorks Animation's rendering, animation, and special effects applications.

 Check out who is having success using TBB here.  If you have something you would like to say about TBB let us know by emailing us at tbb-users@lists.sourceforge.net. 

More

For developers, the clear benefits of Threading Building Blocks are:

1. TBB significantly reduces the number of lines of code required to develop multithreaded applications;
2. TBB significantly reduces the programming complexity for developing multithreaded applications (by abstracting many details of thread management);
3. TBB's task manager automatically analyzes the system the software is running on, chooses the optimal number of threads, and performs load balancing that spreads out the work evenly across all processor cores;
4. As a result, TBB threaded applications automatically scale to fully utilize all available processing cores on whatever computer they run on -- including future systems that will have many more cores than are available (or affordable) today.

If you have experience developing multithreaded C++ software (new applications, or conversion of legacy applications for operation on multi-processor/multi-core systems), you owe it to yourself to experiment with Threading Building Blocks: try recoding a few sections of software you've threaded using traditional thread libraries, and notice the difference.

The links at the right provide access to TBB resources and means for you to participate in the Threading Building Blocks community. If you have a question, feel free to post it in the TBB forums. Use the top navigation bar to access TBB's documentation and download the stable or development releases. The articles below also provide a good introduction to TBB.

Thanks for visiting ThreadingBuildingBlocks.org. We hope this is just the beginning of your interest in TBB and your engagement in the Threading Building Blocks Open Source community.