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Threading Building Blocks (TBB), a C++ template library designed to simplify the development of applications running in parallel, is now available as an open-source project under version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2) with the runtime exception.

Intel explains that as both an open-source and fully supported commercial offering, TBB parallelism is more accessible for programmers and will improve application performance on multi-core processors. It uses generic programming to be efficient, but has programmers express tasks instead of threads. This allows scalable programs at a fraction of the developer effort compared

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to C++ with threading packages.

TBB's task manager automatically analyses 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.

As a result, threaded applications automatically scale to fully utilise all available processing cores on whatever computer they run on, including future systems that will have many more cores than are available today.

"Intel TBB is a proven solution and currently is being used on a wide variety of C++ applications, particularly ones where the notion of getting scalable performance is important," Intel explains. "This covers multiple application segments such as digital content creation, animation, financial services, electronic design and automation and design simulation."

More information - and the source code - can be found at the threadingbuildingblocks.org.

The commercial version of Intel Threading Building Blocks 2.0 is available for $299, which includes one year of technical support, upgrades and new releases. It also included with the recently launched Intel C++ Compiler Professional Editions 10.0.