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OpenMP is Being Improved for Accelerators, Multicore and Embedded Systems

Dépèche transmise le 27 mars 2012 par Business Wire

OpenMP is Being Improved for Accelerators, Multicore and Embedded Systems

CHAMPAIGN, Ill.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--OpenMP, the de-facto standard for parallel programming on shared memory systems, continues to extend its reach beyond pure HPC to include embedded systems, multicore and real time systems. A new version is being developed that will include support for accelerators, error handling, thread affinity, tasking extensions and Fortran 2003. The OpenMP consortium welcomes feedback from all interested parties and will use this feedback to improve the next version of OpenMP.

“This year will be the fifteenth anniversary of OpenMP. Not many parallel languages can say that and we are still growing”

OpenMP aims to provide high-level parallel language support for a wide range of applications, from automotive and aeronautics to biotech, automation, robotics and financial analysis.

The key features that the OpenMP consortium is working on include:

• Support for accelerators. A mechanism will be provided to describe regions of code where data and/or computation should be moved to any of a wide variety of computing devices. User experiences with the OpenACC directives will provide important information to the OpenMP effort. The minimum feature core required for an initial release has been defined.
• Error handling. Error handling capabilities of OpenMP will be defined to improve the resiliency and stability of OpenMP applications in the presence of system-level, runtime-level, and user-defined errors. Features to cleanly abort parallel OpenMP execution have been defined, based on conditional cancellation and user-defined cancellation points.
• Thread affinity. Users will be given a way to define where to execute OpenMP threads. Platform-specific data and algorithm-specific properties are separated, offering a deterministic behavior and simplicity in use. The advantages for the user are better locality, less false sharing and more memory bandwidth.
• Tasking extensions. The new tasking extensions being considered are task deep synchronization, dependent tasks, reduction support for tasks, and task-only threads. Task-only threads are threads that do not take part in worksharing constructs, but just wait for tasks to be executed.
• Support for Fortran 2003. The Fortran 2003 standard adds many modern computer language features. Having these features in the specification allows users to take advantage of using OpenMP directives to parallelize Fortran 2003 complying programs. This includes interoperability of Fortran and C, which is one of the most popular features in Fortran 2003.

"OpenACC contributes to OpenMP by providing real-world exposure to programming concepts embraced by both groups," said Duncan Poole, President of the OpenACC standards group. "The founding OpenACC members are all members of the OpenMP Working Group on Accelerators. Even now as OpenACC compilers are released to the market, we look forward to a time when our experiences bring additional validation to the standard we are all developing within the OpenMP process. Developers will benefit from early access to OpenACC tools, and can be assured that these same companies are working to support OpenMP in a future version."

“This year will be the fifteenth anniversary of OpenMP. Not many parallel languages can say that and we are still growing,” said Michael Wong, CEO of the OpenMP ARB, “OpenMP will be made more robust, and will cover more types of systems.”

About OpenMP

The OpenMP Application Program Interface (API) is a multi-platform shared-memory parallel programming model for the C, C++ and Fortran programming languages. Jointly defined by a group of major computer hardware and software vendors and the user community, OpenMP is a portable, scalable model that gives shared-memory parallel programmers a simple and flexible interface for developing parallel applications for platforms ranging from multicore systems and SMPs, to embedded systems. OpenMP is the most popular shared-memory parallel programming model in use today and is a cornerstone technology in high performance and technical computing.

About the OpenMP Architecture Review Board

Incorporated in 1997, The OpenMP ARB is the non-profit corporation that owns the OpenMP brand, oversees the OpenMP specification and produces and approves new versions of the specification. Further information can be found at http://www.openmp.org/.