Programming OpenMP Work Sharing Loop Optimization: As you know, OpenMP contains a very powerful set of pragmas that help you parallelize a loop. What you may not know is that OpenMP can be used to thread more than just loops. When the "parallel for" construct falls a little short, OpenMP has additional pragmas, constructs, and function calls that come to the rescue.

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Abstract

By Richard Gerber

As you know, OpenMP* contains a very powerful set of pragmas that help you parallelize a loop. What you may not know is that OpenMP can be used to thread more than just loops. When the "parallel for" construct falls a little short, OpenMP has additional pragmas, constructs, and function calls that come to the rescue.

This is the second in a series of three white papers that teach you, an experienced C/C++ programmer, how to get started using OpenMP, simplifying the creation, synchronization, and deletion of threads in your applications. The first paper introduced you to the most common feature of OpenMP: work sharing for loops. This second paper teaches you how to exploit non-loop parallelism and some of the other general OpenMP features. The final paper discusses the OpenMP runtime library and how to debug your application when things go wrong.