Pipelines make a great way to exploit parallelism, and there are two great ways worth exploring to do exactly that.

Of course - both offer solutions for good scaling with multi-core processors, and both focus on fitting into C++.

Where they differ is how much they help with avoiding non-determinism in your parallel application.

One solution makes it your problem, and the other guarantees a deteministic program.  As you might guess - to use the guaranteed method will require more learning of the techniques, and more investment of re-casting your program in new terms.

Is it worth it?  Time will tell - both are available for trying - free of charge...

Intel Threading Building Blocks offers pipeline constructs for just this reason - and is available for free.  TBB doesn't force you to make you program easy to debug - it makes that your problem.  On the other hand, TBB makes doing pipelines in C++ with great scalability very easy - it slips into a C++ program without a great deal of learning necessary. It is easily one of the most popular features in TBB.

Whatif.intel.com offers Intel Concurrent Collections for C/C++ which embodies many of the concepts here - and is available to experiment with for free. CCC takes more effort to learn, but in exchange guarantees a deterministic program. It grows out of a research project formerly known as T-Streams (tagged streams), which is now very timely for multi-core processors.

 TBB is a couple years old, and nearing one year as an open soruce project.  CCC is a very new entrant - appearing on Whatif very recently.