PRESS RELEASE

November 13, 2012 – SALT LAKE CITY — (BUSINESS WIRE) — OpenMP, the de-facto standard for parallel programming on shared memory systems, continues to extend its reach beyond pure HPC to include DSPs, real time systems, and accelerators. The first release candidate of OpenMP 4.0 is being made available at the SC12 conference and exhibition. The OpenMP consortium welcomes feedback from all interested parties on the current release candidate and will use this feedback to improve the next version of OpenMP. Feedback can be posted on the OpenMP Forum, for which registration is required.

OpenMP aims to provide high-level parallel language support for a wide range of applications, from automotive and aeronautics to biotech, automation, robotics and financial analysis.

The first release candidate of OpenMP 4.0 includes:

  • thread affinity, allowing users to define where to execute OpenMP threads,
  • initial support for Fortran 2003,
  • SIMD constructs to vectorize both serial as well as parallelized loops,
  • user-defined reductions,
  • sequentially consistent atomics.

“We are proud to mark the 15th anniversary of OpenMP,” said Michael Wong, OpenMP CEO, “with a major leap forward with significant enhancements to parallelism.”

A technical report on directives for attached accelerators has been released last week. It is the intent of OpenMP to integrate the technical report in a final release candidate in the 1st quarter of 2013. The second release candidate will include the directives for attached accelerators, tasking extensions and error handling.