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U Houston Joins OpenMP Consortium

The University of Houston has joined the OpenMP Consortium, a group of research organizations and hardware and software vendors working together to create the OpenMP API specification for shared-memory parallel programming.

UH has been involved with OpenMP since its inception through cOMPunity, the community of OpenMP users, researchers, developers, and providers, but the university has now joined OpenMP as an auxiliary member. In the past, UH has contributed to OpenMP and conducted OpenMP-related research, but it will now be doing so as a member of the architecture review board.

According to information on the OpenMP site, "OpenMP is a portable, scalable model that gives shared-memory parallel programmers a simple and flexible interface for developing parallel applications for platforms ranging from the desktop to the supercomputer." The OpenMP API supports multi-platform shared-memory parallel programming in C/C++ and Fortran on all architectures, including Unix and Windows NT-based platforms.

According to Yonghong Yan, research assistant professor at UH, membership in the consortium is "a great step forward for the UH HPCTools research group," which researches parallel programming models, compiler technologies, and high performance computing (HPC) applications and systems. As a member of the consortium, the HPCTools research group will continue to support standardization of OpenMP by providing reference implementations through the OpenUH compiler and proposing new features, said Yan.

The OpenMP ARB has 14 permanent members and 12 auxiliary members. Permanent members are OpenMP product vendors, and auxiliary members are those that do not create or sell products.

About the Author

Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].

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