A new article, “Full Throttle: OpenMP 4.0” by Michael Klemm, Senior Application Engineer, Intel and Christian Terboven, Deputy Head of HPC Group, RWTH Aachen University, appears in the current issue of Intel’s Parallel Universe magazine.

“Multicore is here to stay.” This single sentence accurately describes the situation of application developers and the hardware evolution they are facing. Since the introduction of the first dual-core CPUs, the number of cores has kept increasing. The advent of the Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor has pushed us into the world of manycore— where up to 61 cores with 4 threads each impose new requirements on the parallelism of applications to exploit the capabilities of the hardware.

It is not only the ever-increasing number of cores that requires more parallelism in an application. Over the past years, the width of SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) registers has been growing. While the early single instruction multiple data (SIMD) instructions of Intel® MMX™ technology used 64-bit registers, our newest family member, Intel® Advanced Vector Instructions 512 (Intel® AVX-512), runs with 512-bit registers. That’s an awesome 16 floating-point numbers in single precision, or eight double-precision numbers that can be computed in one go. If your application does not exploit these SIMD capabilities, you can easily lose a factor of 16x or 8x compared to the peak performance of the CPU.

To read the entire article, download the magazine in PDF.  The article starts on page 6.