Flow Graph Designer: A Tool for Designing and Analyzing Intel® Threading Building Blocks Flow Graphs

Flow Graph Designer is a visualization tool that supports the analysis and design of parallel applications that use the Intel^® Threading Building Blocks (Intel^® TBB) flow graph interface. The flow graph interface allows developers to express the dependency, streaming and data flow graphs present in many domains such as media, gaming, finance, high performance computing and healthcare. Because the flow graph interface introduced a style of programming that is different than loop- and task-parallel approaches, there is a need for new tool support. This paper presents Flow Graph Designer, an experimental graphical tool developed to make the flow graph interface easier to adopt, use, debug and tune. This paper provides a brief introduction to the Intel TBB flow graph interface and an overview of the key features provided by the Flow Graph Designer. Three examples are then presented that demonstrate the utility of this tool for important usage scenarios encountered while designing and analyzing flow graph applications.