Making openMP ready for c++ executors

Abstract

For at least the last 20 years, many have tried to create a general resource management system to support interoperability across various concurrent libraries. The previous strategies all suffered from additional toolchain requirements, and/or a usage of a shared programing model that assumed it owned/controlled access to all resources available to the program. None of these techniques have achieved wide spread adoption. The ubiquity of OpenMP coupled with C++ developing a standard way to describe many different concurrent paradigms (C++23 executors) would allow OpenMP to assume the role of a general resource manager without requiring user code written directly in OpenMP. With a few added features such as the ability to use otherwise idle threads to execute tasks and to specify a task “width”, many interesting concurrent frameworks could be developed in native OpenMP and achieve high performance. Further, one could create concrete C++ OpenMP executors that enable support for general C++ executor based codes, which would allow Fortran, C, and C++ codes to use the same underlying concurrent framework when expressed as native OpenMP or using language specific features. Effectively, OpenMP would become the de facto solution for a problem that has long plagued the HPC community.