Intel Releases Threading Library Under GPL 2

littlefoo writes "Intel Software Dispatch have announced the availability of the Threading Building Blocks (TBB) template library under the GPL v2 with the run-time exception — so this previously commercial only package is now open for all the use, whether for open-source projects or commercial offerings (although they are explicitly encouraging open source use). The interface is more task-based then thread-based, but with a somewhat different view of things than, e.g. OpenMP. From the Intel release: 'Intel® Threading Building Blocks (TBB) offers a rich and complete approach to expressing parallelism in a C++ program. It is a library that helps you leverage multi-core processor performance without having to be a threading expert. Threading Building Blocks is not just a threads-replacement library. It represents a higher-level, task-based parallelism that abstracts platform details and threading mechanism for performance and scalability.'"

Comments

Memory requirements - bummer

[ohell]

I read on their FAQ that TBB requires 512MB to run, though they recommend 1GB. This appears to be very high, especially when compared to Boost.Threads etc. I can't think of a reason why they need to allocate this much - and it would probably be a problem for consumer applications.

Also from the FAQ, the so-called concurrent containers still need to be locked before access. So no change from normal STL containers there.

But I will download it just for the memory allocator they supply, since it can be plugged into STL, and claims to hand out cache-aligned memory. It can apparently be built independently of the rest of TBB.

Re:GPL 2 only

[networkBoy]

Which is perfectly fine. I have a friend at Intel and based on what I've heard of the corporate culture, open ended licenses are a no-go. That doesn't mean they won't later release under GPL v3, just that they want their lawyers to have a chance to review any license they release under and don't want to be beholden to the unknown. Frankly I think that's a good thing. In theory GPLv4 could say: this can be used in closed source proprietary DRM schemes. and if they had the "or later" clause they would have to allow it.
-nB

PS3?

[LinuxGeek]

I checked the site and forum, but no search results on PS3. Having just bought a shiny new 60gig PS3, this release makes me wonder just how easy it could be to take fairly good advantage of all the cores.

Hmmm, it may be one of my first projects; six cores running @ 3.2GHz and an easy method of putting them to use. It would be interesting to parallelize pi calculation and see how long it would take to get one million digits.