Ruud van der Pas (Sun Microsystems) debunks some of the myths about OpenMP he found in a recent article on the web about parallel programming.

Unfortunately, the September 5, 2008 blog titled “The OpenMP Concurrency Platform” written by Charles Leiserson from Cilk Arts repeats some of the persistent myths regarding OpenMP.

Certain comments made also may give rise to a somewhat distorted view on OpenMP for those readers that are less into the aspects of parallel programming. For example, the statement that OpenMP is most suitable for loops only. This has never been the case and certainly the introduction of the flexible and powerful tasking concept in OpenMP 3.0 (released May 2008) is a big step forward.

Read »Ruud’s blog entry