Champaign, IL – November 18, 2013 – The OpenMP Consortium has released OpenMP 4.0, a major upgrade of the OpenMP standard language specifications. OpenMP vendors in high-performance computing and digital signal processing industries show enthusiasm for the upgrade and develop new products for it. The OpenMP 4.0 standard API, showcased at SC13, offers an industry-first high-level support for SIMD programming, and support for the programming of accelerators. Intel, Texas Instruments and IBM have the following ebullient comments about the standard.

“Intel is pleased to see OpenMP 4.0 become a full standard. OpenMP continues to fulfill its mission to build a standard that is truly cross platform,” said James Reinders, chief evangelist of Intel Software Products. “An important milestone for the industry, users and vendors alike, OpenMP 4.0 offers a very portable parallelization model for the neo-heterogeneous world of HPC.”

“The accelerator model now available in OpenMP 4.0 is an important milestone for TI customers,” said Ramesh Kumar, DSP general manager, Texas Instruments. “With the release of TI’s 66AK2H multicore DSP + ARM SOC, customers can benefit from ARM and DSP in one chip. The model provides a seamless way to accelerate customer’s systems and achieve best in class power and performance.”

“The release of OpenMP V4.0 specification is a big advancement in explicit parallel programming models,” said Kevin Stoodley, IBM Fellow and CTO: Rational Software. “The new specification helps users to develop portable applications that exploit a wide range of hardware architectures. This achievement is a result of close collaboration of vendors, users and academia.”

About OpenMP

The OpenMP Application Program Interface (API) is a multi-platform shared-memory parallel programming model for the C, C++ and Fortran programming languages. Jointly defined by a group of major computer hardware and software vendors and the user community, OpenMP is a portable, scalable model that gives shared-memory parallel programmers a simple and flexible interface for developing parallel applications for platforms ranging from multicore systems and SMPs, to embedded systems.

Incorporated in 1997, The OpenMP ARB is the non-profit corporation that owns the OpenMP brand, oversees the OpenMP specification and produces and approves new versions of the specification. More information at http://www.openmp.org/