Programming for multicore: An introduction to OpenMP using GCC-4.4

Jun 02, 2009, 20:33 (0 Talkback[s])

[ Thanks to Seemanta for this link. ]

"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."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Multi-core Clip Show(Apr 02, 2009)
• Windows and Linux Not Well Prepared For Multicore Chips(Mar 23, 2009)
• Shopping on Penguins(Mar 21, 2009)
• Multicore Is Bad News For Supercomputers(Nov 11, 2008)
• Networking Scalability on High-Performance Servers(Jan 15, 2008)
• Open Source Thoughts: Parrot and Multicore(Sep 28, 2007)
• Massively Multicore Processor Runs Linux(Aug 21, 2007)
• Sun Pushes Multicore Tools to Linux Developers(Jun 12, 2007)