OpenMP News
»Article - Design of OpenMP Tasks
The March 2009 edition of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems features an article on the design of tasks in OpenMP by Eduard Ayguadé, Nawal Copty, Alejandro Duran, Jay Hoeflinger, Yuan Lin, Federico Massaioli, Xavier Teruel, Priya Unnikrishnan, Guansong Zhang.
OpenMP has been very successful in exploiting structured parallelism in applications. With increasing application complexity, there is a growing need for addressing irregular parallelism in the presence of complicated control structures. This is evident in various efforts by the industry and research communities to provide a solution to this challenging problem. One of the primary goals of OpenMP 3.0 is to define a standard dialect to express and efficiently exploit unstructured parallelism. This paper presents the design of the OpenMP tasking model by members of the OpenMP 3.0 tasking sub-committee which was formed for this purpose. The paper summarizes the efforts of the sub-committee (spanning over two years) in designing, evaluating and seamlessly integrating the tasking model into the OpenMP specification. In this paper, we present the design goals and key features of the tasking model, including a rich set of examples and an in-depth discussion of the rationale behind various design choices. We compare a prototype implementation of the tasking model with existing models, and evaluate it on a wide range of applications. The comparison shows that the OpenMP tasking model provides expressiveness, flexibility, and huge potential for performance and scalability.
The article is currently available from the »IEEE website in PDF.
»OpenMP Overview - Slides and Video
Ruud van der Pas of Sun Microsystems recently gave an overview of OpenMP at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
The slides are now available: »An Overview of OpenMP - Ruud van der Pas - Sun Microsystems
Here is the video of the talk:
»SC08 OpenMP “Hands-On” Tutorial Available
Tim Mattson and Larry Meadows, both of Intel, presented a day-long tutorial introducing parallel programming with OpenMP at SC08 last week in Austin, TX.
The slides and class exercises from that tutorial are now available:
- Hands-On Introduction to OpenMP, Mattson and Meadows, from SC08 (Austin) (PDF)
- Code Exercises (zip)
»OpenMP 3.0 Status
»Christian Terboven reports:
SC08 brought us some pretty good news regarding availability of (full) support for OpenMP 3.0:
- Intel 11.0: Linux (x86), Windows (x86) and MacOS (x86)
- Sun Studio Express 11/08: Linux (x86) and Solaris (SPARC + x86)
- PGI 8.0: Linux (x86) and Windows (x86)
- IBM 10.1: Linux (POWER) and AIX (POWER)
GCC 4.4 will have support for OpenMP 3.0 as well, it is currently in regression fixes and docs only mode (see http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2008-11/msg00007.html).
»OpenMP at SC08 Austin
Michael Wong of IBM Canada attended the OpenMP “Birds-of-a-Feather” meeting at SC08 in Austin, TX this week, and is blogging about it on his »C/C++ Cafe blog.
»OpenMP 3.0 Specs Summary Card
An 8 page summary card of the OpenMP 3.0 specifications is now available:
»Version 3.0 Summary Card (November, 2008) (PDF)
»New Book (in German)
OpenMP - Eine Einführung in die parallele Programmierung mit C/C++
(OpenMP - An Introduction into Parallel Programming with C/C++ )
von Rainer Lienhart und Simon Hofmann, (Universität Augsburg)
Has been published by »Springer (in German). Here is the description:
Über dieses Lehrbuch
OpenMP ist ein weit verbreiteter de-facto-Standard für High-Level Shared-Memory-Programmierung, der für viele Plattformen, u.a. Linux und Microsoft Windows, zur Verfügung steht. Das Programmiermodell von OpenMP ermöglicht einen einfachen, skalierbaren und flexiblen Ansatz zur Entwicklung paralleler Applikationen unter FORTRAN, C und C++. Seit seiner Einführung 1997 wird Open MP von der Mehrheit der High-performance Compiler- und Hardwarehersteller unterstützt.
In diesem Buch wird Open MP ausführlich vorgestellt und gezeigt, wie eine Implementierung paralleler C/C++ Algorithmen erfolgt.
This book can also be purchased as a PDF download from the Springer website.
»PGI Announces Release 8.0 With Full OpenMP 3.0 Support
Full support for the OpenMP 3.0 parallel programming standard for multi-core x64 CPUs and multi-socket servers, including full support for TASKs in PGF95 and PGCC in release 8.0.
More information is at the »PGI website.
