  Shared memory multiprocessors come back to popularity thanks to rapid
spreading of commodity multi-core architectures. As ever, shared memory
programs are fairly easy to write and quite hard to optimise; providing
multi-core programmers with optimising tools and programming frameworks is a
nowadays challenge. Few efforts have been done to support effective streaming
applications on these architectures. In this paper we introduce FastFlow, a
low-level programming framework based on lock-free queues explicitly designed
to support high-level languages for streaming applications. We compare FastFlow
with state-of-the-art programming frameworks such as Cilk, OpenMP, and Intel
TBB. We experimentally demonstrate that FastFlow is always more efficient than
all of them in a set of micro-benchmarks and on a real world application; the
speedup edge of FastFlow over other solutions might be bold for fine grain
tasks, as an example +35% on OpenMP, +226% on Cilk, +96% on TBB for the
alignment of protein P01111 against UniProt DB using Smith-Waterman algorithm.
