OpenMP extensions for generic libraries

Abstract

This paper proposes extensions to the OpenMP standard to provide first-class support for parallelizing generic libraries such as the C++ Standard Library (SL). Generic libraries are especially known for their efficiency, reusability and composibility. As such, with the advent of ubiquitous parallelism, generic libraries offer an excellent avenue for parallelizing the existing applications that use these libraries without requiring the applications to be rewritten. OpenMP, which would be ideal for executing such parallelizations, does not support many of the modern C++ idioms such as iterators and function objects that are used extensively in generic libraries. Accordingly, we propose extensions to OpenMP to better support modern C++ idioms to aid in the parallelization of generic libraries and applications built with those libraries. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.