OpenMP is an Application Programming Interface (API) to write shared memory parallel applications in C, C++ and Fortran. It consists of a set of compiler directives, library routines, and environment variables.
Programming in OpenMP has following advantages:
Can dramatically improve program performance on modern multicore architectures.
Enables programmers to easily write portable code since OpenMP is supported on a large number of compilers.
Requires little programming effort. Programmers identify the code that can be parallelized in existing programs, and add pragmas to parallelize it.
Enables programmers to parallelize their code incrementally.
To take advantage of the compiler OpenMP support, use OpenMP directives and functions to parallelize sections of your code, and use the –xopenmp option when compiling. See the Oracle Solaris Studio 12.4: OpenMP API User’s Guide for details.