OpenMP 5.0 Specification Released, GCC 9.0 Lands Initial Support

The OpenMP ARB has announced the release today of the major OpenMP 5.0 specification. OpenMP 5.0 has been three years in the making and is a big update to this parallel programming specification relative to past updates.

OpenMP 5.0 is intended for use from embedded and accelerators to multi-core NUMA systems. OpenMP 5.0 offers portability improvements, full support for accelerators, better NUMA handling on HPC systems, improved device constructors, and various other benefits for parallel programming on C / C++ / Fortran systems.

The OpenMP 5.0 specification in full can be found now at OpenMP.org. Other commentary on OpenMP 5.0 can be found via today's press release.

The GCC compiler folks are the furthest along among the public compilers with support for OpenMP 5.0. Merged today is already partial support for OpenMP 5.0. For the upcoming GCC 9 stable release due out in early 2019, it looks like only partial support will be ready. "Because the amount of changes in OpenMP 5.0 is much bigger than in any of the earlier releases of the standard, unfortunately the whole spec isn't implemented at this point, not even for C/C++. So, let me start by listing features that are implemented. Unless otherwise stated, the implementation is for now for C/C++ only, Fortran to follow after C/C++ is fully done." That aforelinked message covers all of the grand features for OpenMP 5.0 and what is progressing or not for GCC 9.