Algorithms and Parallel Computing

6.2 CONCURRENCY PLATFORMS

An alternative to these low-level do-it-yourself tools is the concurrency platform—this is a software that allows coordination, scheduling, and management of multicore resources. Examples of concurrency platforms include [55]

• .NET ThreadingPool class [56]
• message-passing libraries such as message passing interface (MPI) [57]
• data-parallel programming languages such as NESL [58], Ct from RapidMind/Intel [59];
• task parallel libraries such as Intel’s Threading Building Blocks (TBB) [60], Microsoft’s Task Parallel Library (TPL) [61], and Microsoft’s Concurrency Runtime; and
• extensions to programming languages such as OpenMP [51], Cilk++ [50], C++ [62], and Microsoft’s Parallel Patterns Library (PPL) [63].

In the following sections, we illustrate using concurrency platforms.