Introduction to OpenMP - Easy multi-threading for C/C++

As well as other compilers, Visual Studio 05 and 08 (Professional and Team System editions) support the OpenMP v2 standard. It’s a collection of language extensions which make it easier to create multi-threaded code. Here I’ll give a quick taster of two of the OpenMP ‘directives’ – ‘Parallel’ and ‘For’.
Parallel allows you to specify a block of code which executes multiple times in parallel:

void ParallelTest() 
{  
   #pragma omp parallel num_threads(4)  
  {  
      int i = omp_get_thread_num();  
      printf_s("ParallelTest: Hello from thread %d\n", i);  
  }  
}

Results in the output:
ParallelTest: Hello from thread 0
ParallelTest: Hello from thread 3
ParallelTest: Hello from thread 1
ParallelTest: Hello from thread 2
The ‘for’ directive allows a for loop to be split up and executed in several threads:

void ForTest() 
{  
  #pragma omp parallel for  
   for (int j=0; j<=4; ++j)   
   {  
       int threadNum = omp_get_thread_num();  
       printf_s("ForTest: Hello from thread %d            - loop iteration %d\n", threadNum, j);  
   }  
}

Results in the output:
ForTest: Hello from thread 0 - loop iteration 0
ForTest: Hello from thread 2 - loop iteration 3
ForTest: Hello from thread 1 - loop iteration 2
ForTest: Hello from thread 3 - loop iteration 4
ForTest: Hello from thread 0 - loop iteration 1

The thing which I find really cool about OpenMP is that it requires such little change to the code. Normally you’d need to write a lot of lines of code to accomplish the same results we see above, but with OpenMP it’s often as little as a single line – which you can comment out to go back to a single threaded approach. So if you find an inner loop which is hogging performance, and lends itself to parallelization, you can quickly make it multithreaded. It's supported on Xbox 360, but not across all game consoles. It's certainly useful for speeding up your tools.
For a list of other compilers which support OpenMP, see here. Note that Visual Studio 2005 does support it, but isn’t listed, as they just list the latest version.
To enable OpenMP in your Visual Studio C++ project, you need to:

• #include <omp.h> // Include OpenMP
• Go to your ‘Project properties->C/C++->Language->OpenMP Support’, and set it to ‘Yes’.

To find out more about these and the other OpenMP directives, you can see a list on MSDN.
In my previous post, I introduced Cuda. These two technologies are very different - OpenMP requires minimal code change and runs on CPU, while Cuda requires much more work but allows you to run on the GPU with many more cores.