Abstract-Many sparse or irregular scientific computations are memory bound and benefit from locality improving optimizations such as blocking or tiling. These optimizations result in asynchronous parallelism that can be represented by arbitrary task graphs. Unfortunately, most popular parallel programming models with the exception of Threading Building Blocks (TBB) do not directly execute arbitrary task graphs. In this paper, we compare the programming and execution of arbitrary task graphs qualitatively and quantitatively in TBB, the OpenMP doall model, the OpenMP 3.0 task model, and Cilk Plus. We present performance and scalability results for 8 and 40 core shared memory systems on a sparse matrix iterative solver and a molecular dynamics benchmark.