Shared Memory, Thread Based Parallelism:

• OpenMP is based upon the existence of multiple threads in the shared memory programming paradigm. A shared memory process consists of multiple threads.

Explicit Parallelism:

• OpenMP is an explicit (not automatic) programming model, offering the programmer full control over parallelization.

Fork - Join Model:

• OpenMP uses the fork-join model of parallel execution:

  

• All OpenMP programs begin as a single process: the master thread. The master thread executes sequentially until the first parallel region construct is encountered.

• FORK: the master thread then creates a team of parallel threads

• The statements in the program that are enclosed by the parallel region construct are then executed in parallel among the various team threads

• JOIN: When the team threads complete the statements in the parallel region construct, they synchronize and terminate, leaving only the master thread

Compiler Directive Based:

• Most OpenMP parallelism is specified through the use of compiler directives which are imbedded in C/C++ or Fortran source code.

Nested Parallelism Support:

• The API provides for the placement of parallel constructs inside of other parallel constructs.

• Implementations may or may not support this feature.

Dynamic Threads:

• The API provides for dynamically altering the number of threads which may used to execute different parallel regions.

• Implementations may or may not support this feature.

I/O:

• OpenMP specifies nothing about parallel I/O. This is particularly important if multiple threads attempt to write/read from the same file.

• If every thread conducts I/O to a different file, the issues are not as significant.

• It is entirely up to the programmer to insure that I/O is conducted correctly within the context of a multi-threaded program.

Memory Model: FLUSH Often?

• OpenMP provides a "relaxed-consistency" and "temporary" view of thread memory (in their words). In other words, threads can "cache" their data and are not required to maintain exact consistency with real memory all of the time.

• When it is critical that all threads view a shared variable identically, the programmer is responsible for insuring that the variable is FLUSHed by all threads as needed.

• More on this later...