Portable compilers for OpenMP

Abstract

The recent parallel language standard for shared memory multiprocessor (SMP) machines, OpenMP, promises a simple and portable interface for programmers who wish to exploit parallelism explicitly. In this paper, we present our effort to develop portable compilers for the OpenMP parallel directive language. Our compiler consists of two parts. Part one is an OpenMP parallelizer, which transforms sequential languages into OpenMP. Part two transforms programs written in OpenMP into thread-based form and links with our runtime library. Both compilers are built on the Polaris compiler infrastructure. We present performance measurements showing that our compiler yields results comparable to those of commercial OpenMP compilers. Our infrastructure is freely available with the intent to enable research projects on OpenMP-related language development and compiler techniques.