![composing parallel software efficiently with lithe sumamry composing parallel software efficiently with lithe sumamry](https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/hotpar09/tech/full_papers/liu/liu_html/TOS-Kernel.jpg)
This “future-proofing” has paid off as the number of cores in mainstream processors has grown from two in 2006 to more than 64 in 2018! Its goal now, and when it was first introduced over 10 years ago, is to provide an easy and powerful way for developers to build applications that continue to scale as new platforms, with different architectures and more cores, are introduced. The TBB library was first released in September of 2006 to address the unique challenges of mainstream parallel programming.
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If multicore processors were to become mainstream, parallel programming had to become mainstream too, especially for developers who care about performance. The number of processors in these first multicore desktop and laptop systems was small – only two cores – but the number of developers that had to become parallel programmers was huge. But a little over 10 years ago, the first multicore chips intended for desktops and laptops started to enter the marketplace. For decades, scientists have been developing large-scale parallel simulations for supercomputers, and businesses have been developing enterprise applications for large multiprocessor mainframes. Parallel programming has a long history, stretching back to the 1950s and beyond.