You're thinking of C++'s "executor", which is currently being discussed for addition to the standard. The parallel STL will use the executors once they're added to a technical specification. There's agreement on how integration this will work, and that it's the right thing to do, but executors don't have a fully agreed-upon API yet.
We (the C++ standards committee) discussed these things further this week :-)
Ah, thanks for correcting me. I've read about it year or more ago, a short article and I couldn't find it.
There are a lot of papers to follow, unfortunately. Listed here:
http://open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2014/
http://open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2015/
You'll want to follow mostly Mysen's and Kohlhoff's proposals on executors.
I think Microsoft's PPL had something where it would've cooperated with the OS, but things did not worked out as expected and it wasn't delivered. Or I could be completely wrong, some links here:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee207192.aspx
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd984036.aspx