The debate over OpenMP versus OpenACC for manycore and heterogeneous computing is starting to heat up.
Michael Wong (CEO of OpenMP Corp), Barbara Chapman (Univ. Houston), and Yonghong Yan (Assistant Prof. Univ. Oakland and OpenMP ARB representative) have written a nice, quick read, comparative article on HPCWire: “A Comparison of Heterogeneous and Manycore Programming Models“. The article highlights the greater maturity of OpenMP and provides two very nice summary tables. The following excerpted table shows parallelism patterns and offload capabilities.
Figure 1: Comparison of heterogeneous and manycore programming models – Parallelism patterns and Architecture abstractions and data/computation binding. (Image courtesy HPCwire)
Jack Wells the OLCF Director of Science at OakRidge expressed the following opinion concerning the future of OpenMP versus OpenACC during his recent Jan. 2015 keynote at the recent OpenACC Workshop held at the University of Houston.
The relationship between OpenACC and OpenMP is not solely a competitive one. The idea is that the two standards will continue to inform one another, and, eventually, merge. For now, though, OpenACC is ahead of the curve on accelerators, and some of its ideas will be used in future releases of OpenMP.
See the Oakridge article, “OLCF Emphasizes Importance, Furthers Development of OpenACC Standard” for more information about Jack’s keynote and the OakRidge view of OpenACC.
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