Outfitting C++ for Multie-core Processor Parallelism

[kenthompson1]

Warning: This post is just a sappy love festinregardsJames Reinders book.

I recently became aware of the Intel TBB library, luckily, just as I'm about to write a fairly large project. At first I found the examples and the supplemental documentation difficult to grasp. Functions such as parallel_for, parallel_reduce, and parallel_scan were perplexing for a programmer like me who has been in a serial computing world for so long. Furthermore, deducing the pratical usage of the TBB library seemed difficult to understand. That all changed after I ordered James Reinder's book.

James presented core concepts to thinking parallel, in parallel (no pun intended) with useful library specific calls. I ordered the book hoping to either put a nail in the coffin of my inability to understand TBB or to be pleasantly surprised at its simplicity. Obviously, I found the latter to be the case.

If you are evaluating TBB for your own use I strongly recommend you get a copy.

Ken Thompson

EXACOM, Inc.

James, if you happen to glance this post. There is a typo you should be aware of. Page 105. Chapter 6: Scalable Memory Allocation."If you are diligent and make sure you are not maxing malloc/free and scalable_malloc/scalable_free..." Maxing should be Mixing

[Kevin_Farnham]

Ken, your perception of the book is a lot like mine (see my "review" in my blog post "Intel Threading Building Blocks" - the Book). Parallel programming is difficult, and while the TBB documentation is superb in my opinion, the book puts it all into perspective in a way that then makes the detailed documentation more readily understandable.

Thanks for your post, and welcome to the Threading Building Blocks community!

[Randy_S_Intel]

Make sure you submit that erratum to the publisher! http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596514808/errata/
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RDS