Installing and Using Intel® Threading Building Blocks (Intel® TBB) on Linux

These directions are for the open-source development release of TBB 2.1. The development release includes some features under development for TBB 2.2. See http://www.threadingbuildingblocks.org/ for the latest information on TBB and links to the commercial license version.

Installing TBB

Below are the steps to download and build TBB:

Download the compressed archive http://www.threadingbuildingblocks.org/uploads/76/139/2.1%20update%204/tbb21_20090511oss_src.tgz to a temporary directory. For example, download it as "/tmp/tbb21_20090511oss_src.tgz".
Create the directory where you want to install TBB. For example, "mkdir /usr/foo/".
Go to the installation directory. For example, "cd /usr/foo/".
Unpack the compressed archive into the installation directory. For example, run "tar xvfz /tmp/tbb21_20090511oss_src.tgz".

"cd tbb21_20090511oss". In the directory, you should see:

build/  CHANGES  COPYING  doc/  examples/  include/  index.html  Makefile  README  src/

[Optional] If using the Intel compiler, set the environment variable "compiler" to icc. The default is gcc.
Build TBB by running "make" with no arguments. It usually takes less than a minute on a modern machine.
The makefile builds two copies of TBB: a debug version with internal checking and a release version without. After the build, these will be in separate directories with names matching the pattern build/linux*cc*libc*kernel*{debug,release}. The expansion of * indicates the compiler and platform.
[Optional] Run "make test" to build and run unit tests. This step is CPU intensive and takes on the order of a quarter hour on a modern quad-core machine.

TBB can be built for different compilers and platforms using the same initial directory. The makefile puts each configuration in its own build/*/ directory. Such builds can proceed concurrently.

Using TBB

TBB consists of a run-time library and header files. One way to let the compiler find them is to source the appropriate file tbbvars.* from your shell as follows:

Choose whether you will compile/run using the debug or release version of TBB.
Examine build/*/tbbvars.* and choose the file that corresponds to your platform and choice of debug/release.
Suppose the path to the tbbvars.* file is $(bar)/tbbvars.*. Do one of the following:
- If using sh or bash as your shell, run "source $(bar)/tbbvars.sh".
- If using csh, run "source $(bar)/tbbvars.sh".
The sourcing adds TBB paths to your environment variables CPATH, LIBRARY_PATH, and LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

For example, if using bash and compiling against the release version, run

source /usr/foo/tbb21_20090511oss/build/linux*cc*libc*kernel*release/tbbvars.sh

To check your environment, "cd tbb21_20090511oss/examples/parallel_reduce/primes" and run "make". It will build and run the program primes if your environment is correct. Below is a sample transcript:

$ cd examples/parallel_reduce/primes/
$ make
g++ -O2 -DNDEBUG  -o primes primes.cpp -ltbb
./primes 100000000 0:4
#primes from [2..100000000] = 5761455 (0.47 sec with serial code)
#primes from [2..100000000] = 5761455 (0.50 sec with 1-way parallelism)
#primes from [2..100000000] = 5761455 (0.24 sec with 2-way parallelism)
#primes from [2..100000000] = 5761455 (0.19 sec with 3-way parallelism)
#primes from [2..100000000] = 5761455 (0.14 sec with 4-way parallelism)

Chapter 2 of the TBB Tutorial describes the TBB directory layout in detail.

Documentation

Documentation on TBB can be downloaded from http://www.threadingbuildingblocks.org/documentation.php". Reading the Tutorial found there is strongly recommended.

Last updated July 2, 2009