In this week's featured video, Intel senior software engineer Gary Carleton provides an overview of Intel tools built to help developers thread code as easily as possible, improve performance, identify bottlenecks, and take advantage of multicore.

In addition to discussing the Intel Thread Profiler, which we've featured previously when comparing lock and lock-free code, Carleton covers several other Intel threading analysis tools and development products, such as the Intel Thread Checker and VTune Performance Analyzer.

On Intel Threading Building Blocks, Carleton describes the tool as a "template library that sits on top of the of threading APIs and allows the programmer to not have to focus on thread creation and the tread APIs in great detail." Programmers present Threading Building Blocks with a task, and it breaks up the work inside the task and partitions the work out to whatever CPU cores are available for execution.

He added that the template library has multiple purposes: : "[It makes] threading easier to release the programmer from being concerned about the details of programming, [and it makes] the program scalable. The threading building blocks at runtime will determine what CPU cores are available and actually dynamically do that. As cores become available or unavailable, it will modify the workflow according to that."