Expressing pipeline parallelism using TBB constructs: a case study on what works and what doesn’t

Task-based libraries such as Intel’s Threading Building Blocks (TBB) provide higher levels of abstraction than threads for parallel programming. Work remains, however, to determine how straightforward it is to use these libraries to express various patterns of parallelism. This case study focuses on a particular pattern: pipeline parallelism. We attempted to transform three representative applications – content-based image retrieval, compression and video en-coding – to pipelines using TBB. We successfully converted two of the three applications. In the successful cases we discuss our transformation process and contrast the expres-sivity and performance of our implementations to existing Pthreads versions; in the unsuccessful case, we detail what the challenges were and propose potential solutions