OpenMP Extensions for Generic Libraries

This paper proposes extensions to the OpenMP standard toprovide first-class support for parallelizing generic libraries such as theC++ Standard Library (SL). Generic libraries are especially known fortheir efficiency, reusability and composibility. As such, with the adventof ubiquitous parallelism, generic libraries offer an excellent avenue forparallelizing the existing applications that use these libraries withoutrequiring the applications to be rewritten. OpenMP, which would beideal for executing such parallelizations, does not support many of themodern C++ idioms such as iterators and function objects that are usedextensively in generic libraries. Accordingly, we propose extensions toOpenMP to better support modern C++ idioms to aid in the parallelizationof generic libraries and applications built with those libraries.