Getting More From Your Multicore: Exploiting OpenMP From An Open Source Numerical Scripting Language

Abstract

We introduce SLIRP, a module generator for the S-Lang numerical scripting language, with a focus on its vectorization capabilities. We demonstrate how both SLIRP and S-Lang were easily adapted to exploit the inherent parallelism of high-level mathematical languages with OpenMP, allowing general users to employ tightly-coupled multiprocessors in scriptable research calculations while requiring no special knowledge of parallel programming. Motivated by examples in the ISIS astrophysical modeling & analysis tool, performance figures are presented for several machine and compiler configurations, demonstrating beneficial speedups for real-world operations.