Intel on Tuesday will unveil at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, what it described as a substantial upgrade to Intel Threading Building Blocks. TBB 2.1, a developer tool that features a C++ template library for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux,  enables developers to add parallelism to C++.

TBB helps developers implement threading in applications and improves application performance on multicore processors, Intel said. Version 2.1 of TBB makes it easier to apply the tool to new uses such as graphical user interfaces, artificial intelligence, and network input/output.

Task cancellation and exception handling are supported in this latest version. Performance has been improved through algorithms and containers. The release also features improved components for task scheduling and memory allocation, among others. Ease of use has been boosted as well through enhanced APIs.

An affinity partitioner in version 2.1 improves performance in chained parallel operations while a more efficient cache also is highlighted.

Bundled in most Linux OSes and also functioning with Sun Solaris, the commercial product will be available for download Wednesday. An open source version also will be offered.