6.1.16 OpenMP

OpenMP (Open Multi-Processing) is an application programming interface (API) that supports multi-platform shared memory multiprocessing programming in C/C++ and Fortran on many architectures, including Unix and Microsoft Windows platforms. It consists of a set of compiler directives, library routines, and environment variables that influence run-time behavior.

GNU Fortran strives to be compatible to the OpenMP Application Program Interface v4.0.

To enable the processing of the OpenMP directive !$omp in free-form source code; the c$omp, *$omp and !$omp directives in fixed form; the !$ conditional compilation sentinels in free form; and the c$, *$ and !$ sentinels in fixed form, gfortran needs to be invoked with the -fopenmp. This also arranges for automatic linking of the GNU OpenMP runtime library libgomp.

The OpenMP Fortran runtime library routines are provided both in a form of a Fortran 90 module named omp_lib and in a form of a Fortran include file named omp_lib.h.

An example of a parallelized loop taken from Appendix A.1 of the OpenMP Application Program Interface v2.5:

SUBROUTINE A1(N, A, B)
  INTEGER I, N
  REAL B(N), A(N)
!$OMP PARALLEL DO !I is private by default
  DO I=2,N
    B(I) = (A(I) + A(I-1)) / 2.0
  ENDDO
!$OMP END PARALLEL DO
END SUBROUTINE A1

Please note:

• -fopenmp implies -frecursive, i.e., all local arrays will be allocated on the stack. When porting existing code to OpenMP, this may lead to surprising results, especially to segmentation faults if the stacksize is limited.
• On glibc-based systems, OpenMP enabled applications cannot be statically linked due to limitations of the underlying pthreads-implementation. It might be possible to get a working solution if -Wl,--whole-archive -lpthread -Wl,--no-whole-archive is added to the command line. However, this is not supported by gcc and thus not recommended.