Re: [gomp] Challenges in Implementing OpenMP

[Gabriel Dos Reis <gdr at cs dot tamu dot edu>]

Diego Novillo <dnovillo@redhat.com> writes:

| On Thu, 2004-10-21 at 08:09, Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:
| 
| > Allowing programmers to communicate more information for code
| > generation purpose is good -- I don't think anyone is saying that is a
| > bad idea.  However, I'm less convinced that the way to go is for GCC
| > to pick that particular model.
| > 
| One thing to remember in this timeless debate of parallel paradigms is
| that supporting a low-level abstraction such as OpenMP in the compiler
| does not necessarily tie GCC to this particular model.  One can always
| implement higher-level abstractions on top of it.

Someone said if your only tool is a hammer, everything starts looking
as a nail.

| OpenMP is mostly just a threading library that happens to be built into
| the compiler.  The big important advantage of having parallelism
| expressed in such painstaking detail is that the optimizers know exactly
| what they can and cannot do.  With a pure library approach, you pretty
| much have to consider everything volatile.

I think it is time you have a look at STAPL.

|  If the compiler knows what's
| going on, it can make better optimization decisions.
| 
| Note: I personally never found higher level abstractions to be all that
| useful, particularly when trying to extract the last nanosecond of
| performance out of the system.  But, hey, to each his own.  I've had
| this religious discussion many times over the years.

I think I now know your feet are.

-- Gaby