Tools for openMP application development: the POST project

OpenMP was recently proposed by a group of vendors as a programming model for shared memory parallel architectures. The growing popularity of such systems, and the rapid availability of product-strength compilers for OpenMP, seem to guarantee a broad take-up of this paradigm if appropriate tools for application development can be provided. POST is an EU-funded project that is developing a product, based on FORESYS from Simulog, which aims to reduce the human effort involved in the creation of OpenMP code. Additional research within the project focuses on alternative techniques to support OpenMP application development that target a broad variety of users. Functionality ranges from fully automatic strategies for novice users, the provision of parallelization hints, and step-by-step strategies for porting code, to a range of transformations and source code analyses that may be used by experts, including the ability to create application-specific transformations. The work is accompanied by the development of OpenMP versions of several industrial applications.