A compiler for exploiting nested parallelism in OpenMP programs

This paper presents the design and implementation of a parallelization framework and OpenMP runtime support in Intel^® C++ & Fortran compilers for exploiting nested parallelism in applications using OpenMP pragmas or directives. We conduct the performance evaluation of two multimedia applications parallelized with OpenMP pragmas and compiled with the Intel C++ compiler on Hyper-Threading Technology (HT) enabled multiprocessor systems. The performance results show that the multithreaded code generated by the Intel compiler achieved a speedup up to 4.69 on 4 processors with HT enabled for five different input video sequences for the H.264 encoder workload, and a 1.28 speedup on an HT enabled single-CPU system and 1.99 speedup on an HT-enabled dual-CPU system for the audio–visual speech recognition workload. The performance gain due to exploiting nested parallelism for leveraging Hyper-Threading Technology is up to 70% for two multimedia workloads under different multiprocessor system configurations. These results demonstrate that hyper-threading benefits can be achieved by exploiting nested parallelism through Intel compiler and runtime system support for OpenMP programs.