Revisiting OpenMP Auto-Scoping Rules

Abstract

Auto-scoping in OpenMP has been proposed as a means for relieving the programmer from the non-trivial effort of identifying the data sharing attributes of variables used within code regions that produce concurrency, such as parallel and task constructs. In this work we reconsider autoscoping on parallel constructs, including combined parallel-worksharing constructs. We first show that the current implementations do not always scope variables correctly in the presence of nested parallel constructs. We then proceed to extend the set of rules that guide the autoscoping decisions so as to handle nested constructs successfully. We also discuss how this functionality is implemented in the OMPi source-to-source OpenMP compiler.