New Orleans, Louisiana November 15, 2014 – The OpenMP® Architecture Review Board (ARB) confirms the release of a Technical Report defining an Application Programming Interface (API) for performance tools related to OpenMP implementations. This API is based on experience with two prior efforts to define a standard OpenMP tools API: the Sun/Oracle Collector API and the POMP API.

Tools API for support of OpenMP Tools

OMPT, the name under which this API is known, is a minimal set of features to support tools that employ asynchronous sampling to measure application performance. In addition, OMPT defines interfaces to support blame shifting a technique that shifts attribution of costs from symptoms to causes. Finally, OMPT defines callbacks suitable for instrumentation- based monitoring of runtime events. OMPT can be implemented entirely by a compiler, entirely by a runtime system, or with a hybrid strategy that employs a mixture of compiler and runtime support.

Our goal is to simplify the porting of performance monitoring tools so that application designers can run their preferred performance tool regardless of the OpenMP implementation or architecture they use, said Alexander Eichenberger, Research Staff Member at T.J. Watson Research Center, IBM. This increased portability should result in better performance tool offerings, and help improve the quality of OpenMP applications in the field. ,

The OpenMP Tools API will enable tool developers to build powerful, lightweight, and portable performance tools that attribute performance measurements of OpenMP programs at the source level”, said John Mellor-Crumney, Professor at Rice University. By providing a foundation for better performance tools, the OMPT API will help application developers use OpenMP to harness the power of node architectures on current and future supercomputers.”,

Feedback is welcome

The OMPT API described in this Technical Report is a work in progress. The goal of this release is to get feedback on the proposed API. Feedback can be posted on the OpenMP Forum, for which registration is required. This Technical Report is not yet part of the OpenMP Standard, in contrast with Specifications, which are normative. The OMPT API is the result of a multi-year effort by the OpenMP Consortium of HPC vendors, national labs, supercomputing centers, academic institutions and users.