I recently reformatted my desktop and so had to reinstall and in the process updated to newer versions of things. Since I do play with Windows development I reinstalled the latest platform SDK (Feb 2007) now known as the Microsoft® Windows® Software Development Kit Update for Windows Vista™. In an attempt to put off doing some homework I looked around through what was included in this latest SDK and was happy to find full x86/x64 native compilers and cross-compilers. I'm just a student who doesn't make any money with the code I do so I just have been using the Express Versions of Visual Studio 2005 which are free but are limited. They don't include interesting features to play with like OpenMP and 64-bit compilers. Now with a new 64-bit computer I was happy to have 64-bit windows compilers to play with. Anyways, I discovered that the compilers have /openmp flags enabled and seemed to work, although the program wouldn't run thanks to some missing dll's.
The next step to getting it working was to find the Visual Studio 2005 redist pack that contains the dlls for running Visual C++ programs such as the standard library DLL and of course the OpenMP runtime DLL. Now the compilers with this SDK are 14.00.50727.762 which are aligned with Visual Studio 2005 SP1 so we need the SP1 redist pack. The redist pack is available here (x86) or here (x64). This included the necessary vcomp.dll (The OpenMP runtime dll for Visual Studio 2005 SP1) but my test program still couldn't find it.
A bit more searching revealed that I was supposed to #include which would set up the manifest for side-by-side assemblies (Here is a brief description of the side-by-side assemblies thing). Running it again... Success! The test program ran. A quick check of the assembly code generated revealed it did in fact generate the OpenMP code.
Now to see if I could integrate at least partially with the Visual C++ Express IDE. It seems the latest Visual C++ 2005 Express edition has the /openmp option availible in the project options so I just needed to make sure that it was enabled. The one thing to make sure of when setting up is the Windows SDK is that the VC/Include directory is included in addition to Include (same goes for Lib). Compiling and running and it all seems to work still.
After playing around for a bit I discovered one big caveat is that there is no debug version of the OpenMP runtime available with this setup so we'll need some trickery so that omp.h doesn't try to set us up to link to it when the _DEBUG flag is set. It seems that this isn't enough to get program to run in debug mode. When OpenMP is enabled this way, even if we use this preprocessor stuff so that the non-debug version will be linked, if we also link to a debug version of the C/C++ runtime things will break. This means you will need to disable openmp when using debug versions of the CRT.
#ifndef _DEBUG
#include <omp.h>
#endif /* _DEBUG */
What is OpenMP?
OpenMP is a specification of langauge extensions that allow a programmer to specify parts of the program that can be parallelized and the rules that need to be followed for correctness. Work is dynamically assigned to worker threads that automatically created by the OpenMP runtime. This allows data parallelism to be dealt with, without the need to manage threads and resources. I don't know much about it as I'm just starting to play with it so I'll let <insert search engine of choice> tell you more about it.
(Recent versions of GCC should also support OpenMP directly.)
