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Poll Result: More Developers Are Learning about TBB
By Kevin Farnham (108 posts) on March 31, 2008 at 4:22 pm
The March Threading Building Blocks poll suggests that the developer community is learning about TBB, but not that many developers are actively applying TBB in actual projects. The poll asked:
At what project level are you currently applying TBB?
81 people participated in the poll, making the following selections:
- 75.3% (61 votes) - Just getting started (learning about TBB)
- 6.2% (5 votes) - Developing new software that applies TBB
- 6.2% (5 votes) - Modifying existing software to use TBB
- 4.9% (4 votes) - Designing new software that will apply TBB
- 4.9% (4 votes) - Working at multiple levels on multiple TBB projects
- 2.5% (2 votes) - Maintaining software that uses TBB
While it's clear that most people who participated are investigating TBB, it's also interesting to note the breakout for the developers who are actively using (or planning to use) TBB in actual projects. Over 11% of respondants reported that they are designing or developing new software that applies Threading Building Blocks. Almost 9% of respondants are either modifying existing software to apply TBB or maintaining software that already applies Threading Building Blocks. And another 5% of the responding developers are working at multiple levels on multiple TBB projects.
The poll results show that, eight months after TBB was launched as an open source project, there is a group of developers who are deploying TBB in new and existing applications. Meanwhile, there is a much larger group of developers who are interested in the Threading Building Blocks technology. When these projects that are applying TBB are completed to a degree that they can be made publicly available, they will provide a template that can be studied by other developers, as they design and develop their own projects that apply TBB for multithreading and scaling. It will be interesting to repeat this poll after some of these projects are completed and made public.
New poll: your OS for TBB development
The April Threading Building Blocks poll has been posted. This poll asks:
On what Operating System(s) do you develop your TBB applications?
The response options are:
- FreeBSD
- Linux
- MacOS
- Microsoft Windows
- Unix
- Unix on Windows (Cygwin, MinGW, UWIN)
- Other
- More than one OS
Even if you're not working on an actual TBB-related project yet, feel free to vote. Just select the operating system you're using for experimenting with TBB as you learn about it.
To vote, go to the TBB home page and scroll down a bit; you'll see the poll on the right side of the page.
Kevin Farnham, O'Reilly Media TBB Open Source Community, Freenode IRC #tbb, TBB Mailing Lists
Categories: Multicore, Open Source, Threading Building Blocks
Comments (4) 
By ankit_mait on April 2nd, 2008 at 12:50 am
Hi.
I am new to TBB as well as this forum. I have some experience in C++ can i start straight with TBB or do i need to study Java or .NET before i begin..
If not where do i begin from. Any resource/e-book, book etc will be of great value.
Thank you.
PS: I know this may not be the right area to place my query. However any help would be appreciated.
By Jérôme Muffat-méridol on April 2nd, 2008 at 10:18 am
Windows.
By Mike on May 1st, 2008 at 3:38 pm
I would have to say that TBB is lacking in the support aspect. The resources that are available do not fully introduce the developer to working examples and applications.
Nvidia for example has introduced their CUDA language for GPU computing and seem to have a stronger user group then TBB. Nvidia also fully supports its application by providing examples, applications, and product documentation.
One of the biggest hurdles is getting TBB to a state that will work with your system. Is there any documentation on how to install TBB on a windows machine using Visual Studio? or even Cygwin? Yes there are bits and pieces out there, but nothing that is step by step and robust. This may not be the case on linux, I have never tried installing it on a Unix/Linux machine.
Parallel programming is something that I am totally familiar with, and I would also like to make use of this tool as well. Most windows applications can benefit from some parallel programming, which is why a windows OS should be heavily supported. The idea of just switching to a Linux system would not make any sense for just using this tool. MPI and OpenMP have the ability to cover both shared memory and distributed memory systems using multicores, so why should someone change to TBB?
By Robert Reed (Intel) on May 2nd, 2008 at 10:54 am
Whatever gap you see in support for Intel TBB is not because of a lack of effort or interest. For many of us, doing support for TBB in an open source model is a new experience and we're learning as we go. We have a pretty active forum at http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/isn/Community/en-US/forum.....Forum.aspx where many people are asking questions and getting answers. The O'Reilly TBB book by James Reinders is chock full of descriptions and examples. Our distributions include sample programs to demonstrate various features of the library. Our "Extras" folder in the download pages (http://threadingbuildingblocks.org/file.php?fid=82) contains msvs_plugin, a tool for setting up your VS.NET environment to use Threading Building Blocks.
And we're very interested in your experience. Are the resources I just described ones that you've checked out and found lacking? Is there a better way we can spread the word about what TBB is and how to use it? We'd love to hear your thoughts.
I do ask one more thing: could we migrate this discussion over to the TBB forum I mentioned above? If lack of support is a common conception, we'd like to hear from as many people as we can. So far the forum seems to be the most highly tracked discussion area for TBB issues. We do have a pair of mailing lists through SourceForge but traffic on those lists has fallen off in the last month or so. So if I may, I'd like to repost your comments on our TBB forum and maybe stimulate some dialog on this topic from you and others in the community.