Abstract
The OpenMP standard defines an Application Programming Interface (API) for shared memory computers. Since its introduction in 1997, it has grown to become one of the most commonly used API's for parallel programming. But success in the market doesn't necessarily imply successful computer science. Is OpenMP a "good" programming environment? What does it even mean to call a programming environment good? And finally, once we understand how good or bad OpenMP is; what can we do to make it even better? In this paper, we will address these questions.
Highlights
OpenMP [1] is an Application Programming Interface for writing multithreaded programs
We map from the problem domain into the algorithm domain using the specification model. This high level, problem-dependent and usually informal model is used as we translate the mathematics of the problem into high-level data structures, an overall algorithm structure, and collections of software components. As we translate those components into code, we need an abstraction of the parallel computation as supported by the target Application Programming Interface (API)
The Architecture Review Board (ARB) works on future enhancements to the language through its futures committee
Summary
OpenMP [1] is an Application Programming Interface for writing multithreaded programs It is not a replacement for low-level thread libraries. The overwhelming majority of applications programmers, don’t need to control the low level details of how threads execute. They need portability and maintainability coupled with convenience so they can hit tight delivery schedules. Since its introduction in 1997, OpenMP has grown to become one of the top four API’s for expressing concurrency in programs (the others are MPI, POSIX threads, and the threads API used with Microsoft Operating systems) This is a major improvement over the early to mid 90’s when there were dozens of programming environments to choose between. We will provide an answer to the question “how good is OpenMP”
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