Parallel Patterns Library (PPL)

The Parallel Patterns Library (PPL) provides an imperative programming model that promotes scalability and ease-of-use for developing concurrent applications. The PPL builds on the scheduling and resource management components of the Concurrency Runtime. It raises the level of abstraction between your application code and the underlying threading mechanism by providing generic, type-safe algorithms and containers that act on data in parallel. The PPL also lets you develop applications that scale by providing alternatives to shared state.

The PPL provides the following features:

• Task Parallelism: a mechanism to execute several work items (tasks) in parallel

• Parallel algorithms: generic algorithms that act on collections of data in parallel

• Parallel containers and objects: generic container types that provide safe concurrent access to their elements

The Parallel Patterns Library is a Microsoft library designed for use by native C++ developers that provides features for multicore programming. It was first bundled with Visual Studio 2010. It resembles the C++ Standard Library in style and works well with the C++11 language feature, lambdas, also introduced with Visual Studio 2010.

MSDN  describes the Parallel Patterns Library as an "imperative programming model that promotes scalability and ease-of-use for developing concurrent applications." It uses the Concurrency Runtime for scheduling and resource management and provides generic, type-safe algorithms and containers for use in parallel applications.