Is it possible to do a reduction on an array with openmp?
Solution 1
Only in Fortran in OpenMP 3.0, and probably only with certain compilers.
See the last example (Example 3) on:
http://wikis.sun.com/display/openmp/Fortran+Allocatable+Arrays
Solution 2
Array reduction is now possible with OpenMP 4.5 for C and C++. Here's an example:
#include <iostream>
int main()
{
int myArray[6] = {};
#pragma omp parallel for reduction(+:myArray[:6])
for (int i=0; i<50; ++i)
{
double a = 2.0; // Or something non-trivial justifying the parallelism...
for (int n = 0; n<6; ++n)
{
myArray[n] += a;
}
}
// Print the array elements to see them summed
for (int n = 0; n<6; ++n)
{
std::cout << myArray[n] << " " << std::endl;
}
}
Outputs:
100
100
100
100
100
100
I compiled this with GCC 6.2. You can see which common compiler versions support the OpenMP 4.5 features here: https://www.openmp.org/resources/openmp-compilers-tools/
Note from the comments above that while this is convenient syntax, it may invoke a lot of overheads from creating copies of each array section for each thread.
Solution 3
Now the latest openMP 4.5 spec has supports of reduction of C/C++ arrays. http://openmp.org/wp/2015/11/openmp-45-specs-released/
And latest GCC 6.1 also has supported this feature. http://openmp.org/wp/2016/05/gcc-61-released-supports-openmp-45/
But I didn't give it a try yet. Wish others can test this feature.
Solution 4
OpenMP cannot perform reductions on array or structure type variables (see restrictions).
You also might want to read up on private
and shared
clauses. private
declares a variable to be private to each thread, where as shared
declares a variable to be shared among all threads. I also found the answer to this question very useful with regards to OpenMP and arrays.
Andrew Wagner
I'm currently a Post-Doc researcher at the University of Leuven, Belgium working on launching systems for flying wind turbines.
Updated on July 09, 2022Comments
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Andrew Wagner almost 2 years
Does OpenMP natively support reduction of a variable that represents an array?
This would work something like the following...
float* a = (float*) calloc(4*sizeof(float)); omp_set_num_threads(13); #pragma omp parallel reduction(+:a) for(i=0;i<4;i++){ a[i] += 1; // Thread-local copy of a incremented by something interesting } // a now contains [13 13 13 13]
Ideally, there would be something similar for an omp parallel for, and if you have a large enough number of threads for it to make sense, the accumulation would happen via binary tree.
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Hugo Raguet about 8 yearsIt is now possible since OpenMP 4.5; see the answer of Chen Jiang below. Basically, you must specify array sections (see Section 2.4, p. 44 of OpenMP 4.5 spec.). Your #pragma specification would look like this:
#pragma omp parallel reduction(+:a[:4])
Be careful with this however, you have to realize that each thread will allocate its own version of the array section; if you do this on large arrays with many threads, you might make your memory need explode. -
RL-S over 2 yearsit irks me a bit that your
int main()
doesn't return an 'int' :D