Threading Building Blocks

Just for a quick note. Intel recently made their TBB library open source and since it has a different task-based approach to incorporating parallism in C++, it felt interesting. It uses threads internally but keeps the user code away from threads themselves by parallelizing actions/tasks user performs in his/her code. Looks nice, sounds good, since threads are basically a low level detail to achieving benefits of parallel processing and if there can be laid a layer of abstraction that insulates programmers from those details, it could ease out and quicken the developement of parallel processing within applications without getting into the nitty-gritty of threads. Analogously, do we deal with the parallel processing across FPUs?

Few days back I downloaded the Open Sourced Intel Threading Building Blocks library and started to test a few samples with it.

One of the sample solution in there was using parallel_for algorithm (parallel_for.h). It was giving me a fatal error that the file affinity.h could not be found. It did not exist! This file was being included in parallel_for.h.

After much of searching and going quickly through the docs, I could not find the reason but I luckily bumped into a thread in the libraries discussion forum. Where one user complained of the file missing from the development release.

The suggestion to fix this was:

1. Either comment out the include.
2. Add an empty file in the include path.

This resolves the compilation issue but why keep such an include anyway? It wastes a bit of time of everyone who is new to the project and wants to get quickly building out samples and testing/debugging and seeing the library in action. Probably they will fix this soon.

More information can be found here - Latest Developer Release Missing affinity.h.

Hope this helps anyone who is starting out on TBB and falls upon the same problem until that header comes alive in the project while I will go back to experimenting more with it. Good luck and have fun! :)