Champaign, Illinois – Nov 5, 2012 – The OpenMP Consortium announces the release of a Technical Report detailing directives used for the execution of loops and regions of code on attached accelerators. The directives described in this Technical Report are a work in progress, and the goal of this release is to get early feedback on the proposed directives.

“We aim to provide what the marketplace has been looking for, a standard high-level way of programming accelerators across a broad base of languages and for all forms of accelerator devices”, said Michael Wong, OpenMP CEO.

This Technical Report describes a model for the offloading of code and data onto a target device. Any device may be a target device, including graphics accelerators, attached multiprocessors, co-processors and DSPs. The directives detailed in the Technical Report can be used in Fortran, C, and C++.


The directives are the result of a 3-year effort by the OpenMP Consortium of HPC vendors, national labs, supercomputing centers, academic institutions and users. User experience with members’ initiatives have provided important information to the effort.

The Technical Reports are located at https://www.openmp.org/wp/openmp-specifications/

Technical Report process
The OpenMP Consortium has created a process by which Technical Reports can be released to the public. With this process, the Consortium will be able to show intermediate versions of the standardization work, and describe possible future directions or extensions to the OpenMP specification. These Technical Reports are not yet part of the OpenMP Standard, in contrast with Specifications, which are normative.
Feedback can be posted on the OpenMP Forum, for which registration is required.