PRESS RELEASE

The University of Bristol Joins the OpenMP ARB

27 vendors and research organizations now collaborating on developing standard parallel programming model

June 15, 2016 — The University of Bristol has joined the OpenMP ARB, a group of leading hardware and software vendors and research organizations creating the standard for the most popular shared-memory parallel programming model in use today.

“My group is strongly committed to the development and promotion of truly open, cross- platform standards for parallel programming”, said Simon McIntosh-Smith, head of the High Performance Computing group at the University of Bristol. “Developing scientific applications which are capable of exploiting future computer architectures, from multi-core CPUs with wide vector units to many-core GPUs, is already an extremely challenging task. The investment of time and effort required to meet this challenge is best returned by employing standards such as OpenMP, and the early work in my group with partners such as Intel and Cray, has convinced us that OpenMP 4.5 can be a highly effective way of writing portable parallel programs”

The University of Bristol is one of the most popular and successful universities in the UK, and was ranked within the top 40 universities in the world in the QS World University rankings 2015.

“It is good to see that the strong interest of the European OpenMP community also materializes in a growing number of ARB members from the European region”, says Michael Klemm, OpenMP ARB CEO.

The OpenMP ARB now has 13 permanent members and 14 auxiliary members. Permanent members are vendors with a long-term interest in creating products for OpenMP, while auxiliary members have an interest in OpenMP and do not create or sell products.