InformationWeek

November 10, 1997

SMP Apps Get Help

Standard will make programming easier

everal high-end multiprocessing systems vendors, including Digital Equipment, IBM, and Silicon Graphics, announced late last month the completion of a standard that will make it easier to program applications for symmetric multiprocessing systems, and to port those applications to a variety of SMP platforms. OpenMP is an industry standard that will provide an easier interface among parallel-processing systems running Unix or Windows NT.

The development of OpenMP, which also involved Intel and Kuck & Associates Inc., a parallel-processing software vendor in Champaign, Ill., has been going on since last November. For several years, a large segment of the industry has used the X3H5 standard, which was designed to allow programmers to "loop" source code used to write applications in order to run them across multiple processors.

But X3H5 did not address the ability to port parallel applications across scalable proprietary systems. "This [OpenMP] standard addresse s the scalability issues as well as loop-level type parallelism," says Jeff McDonald, a system performance manager in the strategic software organization at Silicon Graphics, in Mountain View, Calif. This is particularly important with the rise of commodity-based parallel-processing systems using Intel microprocessors, both servers and workstations, says Chuck Piper, a market segment manager in the workstation products division at Intel.

The current incarnation of OpenMP supports only Fortran, usually used in high-end technical computing. "In shops that do Fortran-based work, it will have relevance," says Tomas Lofgram, program manager of high-performance technical computing at Digital. However, vendors are already discussing the next development of the OpenMP standard, which will support the C and C++ programming languages by early next year. Says Intel's Piper: "As OpenMP specification is adopted to C++, it will have more relevance." The OpenMP specification is available for download at www.openmp.org .

Back to News in Review