Programming Heterogeneous Multicore Systems Using Threading Building Blocks

Intel’s Threading Building Blocks (TBB) provide a high-level abstraction for expressing parallelism in applications without writing explicitly multithreaded code. However, TBB is only available for shared-memory, homogeneous multicore processors. Codeplay’s Offload C++ provides a single-source, POSIX threads-like approach to programming heterogeneous multicore devices where cores are equipped with private, local memories—code to move data between memory spaces is generated automatically. In this paper, we show that the strengths of TBB and Offload C++ can be combined, by implementing part of the TBB headers in Offload C++. This allows applications parallelised using TBB to run, without source-level modifications, across all the cores of the Cell BE processor. We present experimental results applying our method to a set of TBB programs. To our knowledge, this work marks the first demonstration of programs parallelised using TBB executing on a heterogeneous multicore architecture.