Any use of parallel functionality requires additional compiler and runtime support, in particular support for OpenMP. Adding this support is not difficult: just compile your application with the compiler flag -fopenmp. This will link in libgomp, the OpenMP GNU implementation, whose presence is mandatory.

In addition, hardware that supports atomic operations and a compiler capable of producing atomic operations is mandatory: GCC defaults to no support for atomic operations on some common hardware architectures. Activating atomic operations may require explicit compiler flags on some targets (like sparc and x86), such as -march=i686, -march=native or -mcpu=v9. See the GCC manual for more information.

To use the libstdc++ parallel mode, compile your application with the prerequisite flags as detailed above, and in addition add -D_GLIBCXX_PARALLEL. This will convert all use of the standard (sequential) algorithms to the appropriate parallel equivalents. Please note that this doesn't necessarily mean that everything will end up being executed in a parallel manner, but rather that the heuristics and settings coded into the parallel versions will be used to determine if all, some, or no algorithms will be executed using parallel variants.

Note that the _GLIBCXX_PARALLEL define may change the sizes and behavior of standard class templates such as std::search, and therefore one can only link code compiled with parallel mode and code compiled without parallel mode if no instantiation of a container is passed between the two translation units. Parallel mode functionality has distinct linkage, and cannot be confused with normal mode symbols.

When it is not feasible to recompile your entire application, or only specific algorithms need to be parallel-aware, individual parallel algorithms can be made available explicitly. These parallel algorithms are functionally equivalent to the standard drop-in algorithms used in parallel mode, but they are available in a separate namespace as GNU extensions and may be used in programs compiled with either release mode or with parallel mode.

An example of using a parallel version of std::sort, but no other parallel algorithms, is:

#include <vector>
#include <parallel/algorithm>

int main()
{
  std::vector<int> v(100);

  // ...

  // Explicitly force a call to parallel sort.
  __gnu_parallel::sort(v.begin(), v.end());
  return 0;
}

Then compile this code with the prerequisite compiler flags (-fopenmp and any necessary architecture-specific flags for atomic operations.)

The following table provides the names and headers of all the parallel algorithms that can be used in a similar manner: