AutOMP: An Automatic OpenMP Parallization Generator for Variable-Oriented High-Performance Scientific Codes

Abstract

OpenMP is a cross-platform API that extends C, C++ and Fortran and provides shared-memory parallelism platform for those languages. The use of many cores and HPC technologies for scientific computing has been spread since the 1990’s, and now takes part in many fields of research. The relative ease of implementing OpenMP, along with the development of multi-core shared memory processors (such as Intel Xeon Phi) makes OpenMP a favorable method for parallelization in the process of modernizing a legacy codes. Legacy scientific codes are usually holding large number of physical arrays which being used and updated by the code routines. In most of the cases the parallelization of such code focuses on loop parallelization. A key step in this parallelization is deciding which of the variables in the parallelized scope should be private (so each thread will hold a copy of them), and which variables should be shared across the threads. Other important step is finding which variables should be synchronized after the loop execution. In this work we present an automatic pre-processor that preforms these stages - AutOMP (Automatic OpenMP). AutOMP recognize all the variables assignments inside a loop. These variables will be private unless the assignment is of an array element which depend on the loop index variable. Afterwards, AutOMP finds the places where threads synchronization is needed, and which reduction operator is to be used. At last, the program provides the parallelization command to be used for parallelizing the loop.