Thread Synchronization Windows: As you probably know by now, to get the maximum performance benefit from a processor with Hyper-Threading Technology, an application needs to be executed in parallel. Parallel execution requires threads, and threading an application is not trivial. What you may not know is that tools like OpenMP* can make the process a lot easier.

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Abstract

By Richard Gerber

As you probably know by now, to get the maximum performance benefit from a processor with Hyper-Threading Technology, an application needs to be executed in parallel. Parallel execution requires threads, and threading an application is not trivial. What you may not know is that tools like OpenMP* can make the process a lot easier.

This is the first in a series of three white-papers that teach you, an experienced C/C++ programmer, how to use OpenMP to get the most out of Hyper-Threading Technology. This first paper shows you how to parallelize loops, called work sharing. The second paper teaches you how to exploit non-loop parallelism and some additional OpenMP features. The final paper discusses the OpenMP runtime library functions, the Intel® C++ Compiler, and how to debug your application if things go wrong.