Programming/OpenMP

Programming Details

OpenMP is designed for multi-processor/core, shared memory machines. The underlying architecture can be shared memory UMA or NUMA.

It is an Application Program Interface (API) that may be used to explicitly direct multi-threaded, shared memory parallelism. Comprised of three primary API components:

• Compiler Directives
• Runtime Library Routines
• Environment Variables

OpenMP compiler directives are used for various purposes:

• Spawning a parallel region
• Dividing blocks of code among threads
• Distributing loop iterations between threads
• Serializing sections of code
• Synchronization of work among threads