An Introduction to Balder — An OpenMP Run-time Library for Clusters of SMPs

Abstract

In this paper a run-time library, called Balder, for OpenMP 2.0 is presented. OpenMP 2.0 is an industry standard for programming shared memory machines. The run-time library presented can be used on SMPs and clusters of SMPs and it will provide a shared address space on a cluster. The functionality and design of the library is discussed as well as some features that are being worked on. The performance of the library is evaluated and is shown to be competitive when compared to a commercial compiler from Intel.