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 v4.5.

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 Offloading and Multi Processing Runtime Library libgomp in GNU Offloading and Multi Processing Runtime Library.

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.