Champaign, Illinois — May 2, 2013 — The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) 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.

“We are proud to share our 15 years’ experience developing support for parallel programming models within the OpenMP community.”, says Mateo Valero, director of BSC, “Our researchers have been involved in OpenMP since the beginning, through cOMPunity. BSC has participated in the definition of the tasking model, lately with the inclusion of task dependences.”

“I look forward to BSC continuing their excellent technical contribution from the past into the future.”, says Michael Wong, OpenMP CEO.

Barcelona Supercomputing Center is an HPC research center that holds a significant group of Computer Science researchers and closely collaborates with IT Industry. Its Computer Science research covers all levels from the computer architecture to the parallel applications.

The OpenMP Architecture Review Board (ARB) now has 13 permanent members and 11 auxiliary members. Permanent members are vendors creating products for OpenMP. These are AMD, CAPS-Enterprise, Convey Computer, Cray, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Intel, NEC, NVIDIA, Oracle Corporation, The Portland Group, Inc., and Texas Instruments. Auxiliary members are organizations with an interest in the standard but that do not sell OpenMP products. They are ANL, ASC/LLNL, BSC, cOMPunity, EPCC, LANL, NASA, ORNL, RWTH Aachen University, Sandia National Lab and the Texas Advanced Computing Center.

So much has been happening in OpenMP since SC 12 that we I hope to capture it all in this post while flying back from a C++ Standard meeting.

When we last spoke, you heard that OpenMP has introduced a Technical Report process to improve its agility at issuing interim specifications, and more importantly to obtain user feedback. We used that process to introduce TR1 for accelerator support. We also released Release Candidate 1 which had 31 feature/defect fixes.

Since then, we had the Houston F2F meeting in January 2013, where we gathered to complete the work of

• Incorporating feedback for accelerators and strengthen NVIDIA support where synchronization between teams are not implicit
• Complete work on cancellation
• Improve taskgroup support
• Improve Fortran 2008 support
• Fully specify affinity
• Improved SIMD
• Generalized Tooling and Debugger support
  

…..

You can read it all »here.

9th International Workshop on OpenMP — September 16-18, 2013
Canberra, AUSTRALIA

The »International Workshop on OpenMP (IWOMP) is an annual workshop dedicated to the promotion and advancement of all aspects of parallel programming with OpenMP. It is the premier forum to present and discuss issues, trends, recent research ideas and results related to parallel programming with OpenMP. The international workshop affords an opportunity for OpenMP users as well as developers to come together for discussions and sharing new ideas and information on this topic.

The deadline for paper submissions has been extended to May 10th.

IWOMP 2013 will be a three-day event. The first day will consist of tutorials focusing on topics of interest to current and prospective OpenMP developers, suitable for both beginners as well as those interested in learning of recent developments in the evolving OpenMP standard. The second and third days will consist of technical papers and panel sessions during which research ideas and results will be presented and discussed.

Go to »iwomp.org for more information.

• C++ announced a proposal for leveraging the OpenMP infrastructure for language level parallelisation.
  http://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG21/docs/papers/2013/n3530.pdf
  

• A Paper on “Achieving Efficient Strong Scaling with PETSc using Hybrid MPI/OpenMP Optimisation” has been submitted to arXiv.
  http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.5275
  

• A portable OpenMP runtime library based on MCAPI/MRAPI has been announced.
  http://www.embedded.com/design/mcus-processors-and-socs/4409721/A-portable-OpenMP-runtime-library-based-on-MCAPI-MRAPI-for-embedded-systems–Part-1

In addition to a number of corrections and clarifications to the specifications, Release Candidate 2 includes the following major enhancements:

• Initial accelerators support: Device Data Environments (p16), target constructs (p68: target, target data, target update, declare target, teams, distribute; p151: map clause; and associated runtime routines (p191).)
• Task dependency support through the new depend clause. (p91)
• Initial error model support through cancel and cancellation point constructs to request cancellation of specified region types and to declare a user-defined cancellation point to  check for cancellation requests.. (Section 2.13, p116: Cancellation Constructs)

• Support for Array Sections in C and C++ as well as adding sectioning support for Fortran. (Section 2.4, p36: Array Sections)
• Extends declare simd to allow multiple declarations. (p64)
• New environment variable OMP_DISPLAY_ENV instructs the runtime to display the OpenMP version number and initial values during initialization. (p219)
• Additional enhancements to support Fortran 2003.

These are in addition to enhancements introduced in RC1: thread affinity, initial support for Fortran 2003, SIMD constructs to vectorize both serial and parallelized loops, TASKGROUP, user-defined reductions, and sequentially consistent atomics.

The OpenMP ARB plans to follow this public discussion period with the finalized full 4.0 API specifications later this year.

The 4.0 Release Candidate API specifications (4.0 RC2, 4.0 RC1) and the Technical Report (TR1) PDFs can be downloaded from the »OpenMP Specifications Page.

9th International Workshop on OpenMP — September 16-18, 2013
Canberra, AUSTRALIA

The »International Workshop on OpenMP (IWOMP) is an annual workshop dedicated to the promotion and advancement of all aspects of parallel programming with OpenMP. It is the premier forum to present and discuss issues, trends, recent research ideas and results related to parallel programming with OpenMP. The international workshop affords an opportunity for OpenMP users as well as developers to come together for discussions and sharing new ideas and information on this topic.

IWOMP 2013 will be a three-day event. The first day will consist of tutorials focusing on topics of interest to current and prospective OpenMP developers, suitable for both beginners as well as those interested in learning of recent developments in the evolving OpenMP standard. The second and third days will consist of technical papers and panel sessions during which research ideas and results will be presented and discussed.

Go to »iwomp.org for more information.

Monday, March 11 - Friday, March 15, 2013 at the Center for Computing and Communication RWTH Aachen University, Germany

This event will continue the tradition of previous annual week-long events taking place in Aachen every spring since 2001. Throughout the week, we will cover serial (Monday) and parallel programming using MPI (Tuesday) and OpenMP (Wednesday) in Fortran and C / C++ as well as performance tuning addressing both Linux and Windows platforms. Furthermore, we will introduce the participants to GPGPU programming (Thursday) and programming the brand new Intel Xeon Phi processor (Friday) and provide ample opportunities for hands-on exercises including a “bring-your-own-code” session on Friday. These topics are presented in a modular way, so that you can choose, pick and register for single days in order to let you invest your time as efficiently as possible.

Attendees should be comfortable with C/C++ or Fortran programming and interested in learning more about the technical details of application tuning and parallelization. The presentations will be given in English.

The seminar is free. Allocation is on a first come, first served basis, as we are limited in capacity. Please register separately for any session you intend to participate. Go to: http://www.rz.rwth-aachen.de/ppces for more information. The event is sponsored by the companies Bull and NVIDIA.

Details will be forthcoming. Watch this space.

Our main aim is close on the OpenMP 4.0 Draft.

Topics to be covered in this meeting include: Tasking, Fortran 2003 base language support, Affinity, Accelerators, Error Models, and SIMD.

These meetings are open to the public. However, if you wish to attend the meeting, please notify us at info@openmp.org and meeting details will be sent to you.

This meeting will be held at the University of Houston, 4800 Calhoun Rd, Houston Texas, USA 77004.

Future meetings of the OpenMP Language Committee are planned for  May in Niagara Falls and September in Australia