CLOUD

In recent years, OpenMP has shifted from being solely focused on shared-memory systems to also include accelerators, embedded systems, multicore and real-time systems. Today the OpenMP Architecture Review Board (ARB) releases a new Mission Statement to formalize this change.

A technical report on directives for attached accelerators was first released in 2012, and subsequently, a full revision of the standard, OpenMP 4.0, was released in 2013, which included support for accelerators, SIMD constructs to vectorize both serial as well as parallelized loops, error handling, thread affinity, and tasking extensions.

Following these releases, the OpenMP ARB is ready for a new mission statement. The old mission statement was focused on shared-memory systems, but the new Mission Statement broadens this mandate to “Standardize directive-based multi-language high-level parallelism that is performant, productive and portable.”

“The new Mission Statement for OpenMP is the result of a collaborative consultation between members, industry, and academia", said Michael Wong, OpenMP CEO. "It recognizes the changing landscape of parallelism by broadening our mandate to cover more types of architecture, be more robust, responsive, and dynamic while remaining firmly committed to our pedigree. With our firm footing now supporting accelerators and embedded systems, we are open to begin further exploration into more affinity, deeper task dependencies, full error-model, NUMA-access, FPGA, transactional memory, asynchronous and even-driven programming, inter-nodal and intra-nodal interoperability."