Extending the OpenMP tasking model to allow dependent tasks

Tasking in OpenMP 3.0 has been conceived to handle the dynamic generation of unstructured parallelism. New directives have been added allowing the user to identify units of independent work (tasks) and to define points to wait for the completion of tasks (task barriers). In this paper we propose an extension to allow the runtime detection of dependencies between generated tasks, broading the range of applications that can benefit from tasking or improving the performance when load balancing or locality are critical issues for performance. Furthermore the paper describes our proof-of-concept implementation (SMP Superscalar) and shows preliminary performance results on an SGI Altix 4700. Peer Reviewed