OpenMP and the Multicore Era
October 25, 2007,1:00 p.m.
“OpenMP and the Multicore Era”
Barbara Chapman
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Houston
Location: Bldg. 4500N, Weinberg Auditorium
Dual-core machines are actively marketed for desktop and home computing. Systems with a larger number of cores are deployed in the server market. Some cores are capable of executing multiple threads. Clearly, the future is multi- and many-core, as well as many-threaded.
In future, high-end application developers will therefore need to design codes for execution on platforms whose nodes will be multicore, adding an additional level of parallelism to the hardware and an additional level of complexity to the application development process. How will this be handled?
OpenMP is a shared-memory API that was designed to be a portable parallel programming interface for SMPs. It is increasingly expected to be a programming model of choice for exploiting the capabilities of multicore machines. In this presentation, we discuss the programming challenges posed by multicore technology. We then review the status of OpenMP, expected enhancements to its functionality, and further work that may increase its usefulness for multicore programming.