Intel releases updated concurrent C/C++ tools

Intel Corp. has announced version 0.3.0 of its Concurrent Collections for C/C++, downloadable from the company's site.

Among the new and updated features Release 0.3.0 includes are: steps that can now be specified with different priorities to improve performance; support for garbage collection by ref-counting to reduce memory usage.

The collections provide the tools for constructing C++ programs that execute in parallel while allowing application developers to ignore issues of parallelism such as low-level threading constructs or the scheduling and distribution of computations.

The model lets programmers specify high-level computational steps including inputs and outputs without imposing unnecessary ordering on their execution. Code within the computational steps is written using standard serial constructs of the C++ language.

Data is either local to a computational step or it is explicitly produced and consumed by them. An application in this programming model supports multiple styles of parallelism (e.g., data, task, pipeline parallel).

While the interface between the computational steps and the runtime system remains unchanged, a wide range of runtime systems may target different architectures (e.g., shared memory, distributed) or support different scheduling methodologies (e.g., static or dynamic).

Intel is also providing a runtime system for shared memory systems that supports parallel execution although it is not yet highly optimised.