As part of their ongoing alliance, Intel and Sun Microsystems have ported Intel's Linux-compatible multi-core C++ development library to the Linux- and Solaris-compatible Sun Studio. The Intel Threading Building Blocks (TBB) technology has also been made available for the latest version of the Solaris operating system (OS).

Announced last July for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, under the “GPLv2 with runtime exception” license, TBB is now available for the Sun Studio software toolchain, which can be used with Solaris and Linux on x86/x64 platforms, as well as with with Solaris on SPARC processors. Sun Studio is said to provide parallelizing compilers, performance and thread analysis tools, memory and code debuggers, and a NetBeans-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

TBB is a cross-platform, portable library aimed at improving the performance of C++ applications on multicore processors. The library comprises a 120KB runtime combined with “template libraries” linked in at compile time, says Intel. The libraries implement a task scheduler, memory allocator, and timing counter, along with various generic parallel algorithms, thread-safe containers, and synchronization primitives.

According to Intel, TBB simplifies parallel programming by avoiding the low-level coding required with threading packages such as p-threads or Windows threads. It supports the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), and Intel's commercial compilers, but was designed to support “any compiler,” Intel says.

TBB also supports the newly announced Solaris 10 5/08 release. Solaris 10 5/08 is said to add predictive healing features, power management capabilities, and optimized support for Intel processors and graphics technology.

According to Sun, TBB for Solaris will soon be offered in the repository for the mostly open-source OpenSolaris, which was formally released earlier this week. Also this week, Sun demonstrated its Linux-based, GPL-licensable JavaFX technology for creating Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).

Availability

Intel Threading Building Blocks for Solaris and Sun Studio is now available for free download, here. More information on TBB may be found here. Last summer, O'Reilly published a book on the subject, written by James Reinders.

 
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