This document describes requirements for implementations of an interface that computer programs written in the C++ programming language can use to invoke algorithms with parallel execution. The algorithms described by this document are realizable across a broad class of computer architectures.

There is a possibility of a subset of the functionality described by this document being standardized in a future version of C++, but it is not currently part of any C++ standard. There is a possibility of some of the functionality in this document never being standardized, or of it being standardized in a substantially changed form.

The goal of this document is to build widespread existing practice for parallelism in the C++ programming language. It gives advice on extensions to those vendors who wish to provide them.