Registration is now open for CppCon 2021, which starts on October 24 and will be held both in person and online. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting videos of some of the top-rated talks from our most recent in-person conference in 2019 and our online conference in 2020. Here’s another CppCon talk video we hope you will enjoy – and why not register today for CppCon 2021 to attend in person, online, or both!

From Algorithm to Generic, Parallel Code

by Dietmar Kuhl

Summary of the talk:

This presentation starts with a parallel algorithm as it is described in books and turns it into a generic implementation. Multiple options for running the algorithm concurrently based on different technologies (OpenMP, Threading Building Blocks, C++ standard-only) are explored.

Using parallel algorithms seems like an obvious way to improve the performance of operations. However, to utilize more processsing power often requires additional work to be done and depending on available resources and the size of the problem the parallel version may actually take longer than a sequential version. Looking at the actual implementation for an algorithm should clarify some of the tradeoffs.

Showing how a parallel algorithm can be implemented should also demonstrate how such an algorithm can be done when there is no suitable implementation available from the [standard C++] library. As the implementation of a parallel algorithms isn't trivial it should also become clear that using a readily available implementation is much preferable.