gomp - equivalence for threadprivate data

[Matevz Tadel]

Hello,

We are trying to parallelize a program that contains a legacy f77 project 
(GEANT3, ~200k loc). The code uses equivalence statements between array elements 
and common members extensively, e.g.:

       COMMON/GCPARM/IPARAM,PCUTGA,PCUTEL,PCUTNE,PCUTHA,PCUTMU
      +             ,NSPARA,MPSTAK,NPGENE
       REAL PACUTS(5)
       EQUIVALENCE (PACUTS(1),PCUTGA)

We are aware that OpenMP specification explicitly states that common members and 
variables with the threadprivate specifier must not be present in equivalence 
statements. However, as we want to use the equivalence among variables that are 
all threadprivate within the same compilation unit, the reason why this 
limitation could not be lifted is not clear to us.

Thus, we would hope to get the following pragma to compile successfully (for the 
above example)

!$omp threadprivate(/GCPARM/, PACUTS)

as the equivalnce simply needs to do what it would have done in a non-parallel 
program (with the exception of mapping into the thread-local data).

Is there an error in our reasoning?

We are willing to do most of the work needed for implementation of such an 
extension but would defintely need some help and guidance.

In any case, even if there is no hope to get such an extension into the official 
version, we would still like to bypass this issue as we are trying to estimate 
if paralellization of our code makes any sense at all due to possible issues 
with cache trashing and I/O bottlenecks.

Thanks in advance!

Best regards,
Matevz


Currently we are using: gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 4.3.3 20081110 (prerelease)