I have the good fortune to work with a passionate and driven team at Intel. The Intel Software Development Products team is very dedicated to helping software developers get the most out of parallelism, and none more so than the Threading Building Blocks team.

Arch Robison was the principle architect and lead developer of Intel Threading Building Blocks. Arch has been more than gracious in talking with me about Threading Building Blocks, answering my questions, and providing me with the reference and tutorial material that forms the basis of specifications and many explanations in this book. Arch was the most prolific reviewer of the book in terms of helping keep things accurate.

Dave Poulsenis the project manager for a number of products, including Intel Threading Building Blocks, who does his best to protect his team from random interruptions. He has been most gracious at allowing my interruptions to be productive through his kind but direct style of feedback.

Victoria Gromova has been the most active in helping our customers use Intel Threading Building Blocks. She has a reputation for bending the use of Threading Building Blocks to make sure our customers get what they need. She provided examples and commentary for Chapter 11 and helped with short examples elsewhere in the book. The experiences she has shared through many examples provide an important contribution to this book.

Bob Kuhn generated a couple of key examples on packet processing and domain decomposition, which you can find in Chapter 11, along with his fine explanations.

Dennis Lin took the examples explained in Chapter 11 and made them ready to download from the web site and use. He helped correct several key issues for which I am very grateful.

Tim Mattson, co-author of the book Parallel Programming Patterns (Addison-Wesley), gave feedback on how to connect his general work with the specifics I sought to convey in this book. He was most kind to tell me I should know better than to write another book, since he and I both know how much work it is. Another person who told me not to write the book, as a way to push me into doing it, was Greg Stoner. Thank you for the push and the frequent back-and-forth discussions over our shared belief in how exciting the future of processing cores everywhere is going to be.

Laura Cane was instrumental in helping to create the product Reference Guide and the Tutorial from which I drew much material for the core of this book. Laura has helped make the material quite clear and accurate.

Sanjiv Shah manages the lab, as we call it, where our Intel Threading Building Blocks, Intel Thread Profiler, Intel Thread Checker, OpenMP runtime, and Cluster OpenMP runtime are developed, readied for the marketplace, and supported. He has been a relentless champion for customers and strong engineering, as well as a friend. Sanjiv’s support helped make this book possible and he offered feedback on the book as well. In a bigger sense, he made Threading Building Blocks available to us all through his championing it as a product.

Mike Davis, Shobhan Jha, Robert Reed, and Randy Smith have been tireless supporters of Threading Building Blocks and helped with feedback on drafts of this book.

Mike Voss and Alexey Kukanov contributed to the development of Threading Building Blocks and provided key feedback on the draft of this book.

John Taylor Jr. provided feedback nearly cover to cover, which helped a great deal. He provided good insights and his very fresh eyes caught issues we had overlooked a hundred times because they were too familiar to us.

Anton Malkhov, Elena Gavrina, Susan Milbrandt, and Asia Nezhdanova all contributed to the development of Threading Building Blocks and its project management and, therefore, this book.

Clay Breshears, David Mackay, Anton Pegushin, and Vasanth Tovinkere work tirelessly to train and help customers. They shared experiences, examples, and feedback. Their experience with Threading Building Blocks feeds back to the product and to our ability to explain it better.

I also want to thank the OSCON team at O’Reilly, who encouraged me to get the book pulled together sooner rather than later. In particular, Andy Oram provided guidance as the editor, which helped this book a great deal. And thank you to the Tools team at O’Reilly who provided such excellent tools for the book template along with accurate and useful documentation.

And I want to especially thank my wife, Beth, and children, Andrew and Katie, for supporting and encouraging me as I wrote this book. Beth reviewed the opening chapters with a teacher’s eye. Andrew made sure the citations in Chapter 12 are both accurate and properly documented. Katie provided encouragement so that we could work on other things soon.