This tutorial uses the Tachyon sample application. Tachyon is a ray-tracer application, rendering objects described in data files. The application uses balls.dat as the input file. The data files are stored in the /tachyon/dat/ directory.
Originally, Tachyon was an application with parallelism implemented in function pthread_create()(source file /tachyon/src/Windows/pthread.cpp) with explicit threads: one for the rendering, and the other for calculations. In this tutorial we implement parallelization on the calculation thread with OpenMP*, Intel® Threading Building Blocks (TBB), and Intel® Cilk™ Plus. Parallelization is implemented only for the draw_task() function, which you can find in the source file build_serial.cpp.
In this tutorial, you will build different parallel implementations of the same function with the Intel® C++ Compiler. The sample application displays the execution time required to render the object in the window title. This time is an indication of the speedup obtained with parallel implementations compared to a baseline established with a serial implementation in the first step.
