"Jargonspeak calls it 'platform independent shared
memory multiprocessing'. In effect, it's threads without the
associated headache of thread management. By the way, gcc has
supported OpenMP way back from version 4.2. So, you don't need the
latest bleeding edge version for this. However, should you want to,
on Windows you can always download the excellent TDM MingW builds
for gcc-4.4.0 (latest direct link). If you're a Linux geek, you
probably know how to get gcc-4.4 for your distro anyway. Also,
Microsoft Visual C++ Express does not include/support OpenMP -
hence my experiments are limited to gcc on both Win and Lin.
"All right then, let's see how OpenMP aids a classic case of
parallelization: matrix multiplication. Agreed - this is a rather
simple programming problem, and real world problems are usually
harder to parallelize than this. However, this should serve as a
good starting point to explore further."
