Adding TBB Contents to the Multi-Core Related Curriculums

Abstract

With the progress of semiconductor technologies and then the advent of multi-core processors, the age of Serial Computing is over and parallel computing technology is now emerging as mainstream. Parallel programming models are needed to change and the education is need to help sequential programmers adapt to the requirements of this new technology and architecture. Now multi-core related contents have been adopted into curricula syllabus of more than 100 universities in China and about 20,000 undergraduate students will benefit from that each year, those contents be taught are similar among universities. Threading Building Blocks(TBB), a new and will be the best solution for parallel computing on the future many-core processor, is a C++ template library for parallelism that extents C++ template by abstracting away thread management and mapping tasks to threads automatically. TBB represents a higher-level parallelism for performance and scalability. This paper aim at adopting the into university curriculums by introducing the important role of TBB in teaching multi-core related contents. The paper also presents how to integrate TBB with some other program tools such as OpenMP or MPI in the curricula "Multi-core Architecture and Multi-threaded Programming Technologies" of Wuhan University.