It is with great pleasure that I wish to announce OpenMPCon 2015 which is paired and co-located with the sister conference IWOMP 2015 on Sept 28-Oct 2. As OpenMP evolves rapidly with more releases to match pace with the rapidly evolving Hardware and Parallel world (one Technical Report followed by one ratified Specification every year; we are nearly delivering OpenMP 4.1 which you can preview at OpenMPCon), OpenMPCon aims to be the central place for the latest OpenMP Language development, tutorial, tips and tricks, as well developers connecting with language designers, and compiler/tool vendors.  This will be done on Monday and Tuesday, and partially on Wednesday where the tutorial is shared with IWOMP but can be attended by both conferences.

IWOMP continues its rich history of academic refereed journal research paper presentations on Thursday and Friday on the latest research that will move OpenMP forward into the next generation, as well as offering experimental data on current OpenMP usage that will allow the Language Committee to refine existing constructs. These two combined conferences form a very healthy way for OpenMP to remain agile and moving forward.

Whether you are an OpenMP Developers/Students/Consultants/Educators, Managers / Directors / Team Leaders, Vendor Companies/Sponsors/Book Publishers, or Career Seekers & Recruiters, here are reasons to attend
or sponsor. Note that sponsorship of OpenMP also implies automatic sponsorship of IWOMP and vice versa.

The latest Program Schedule is online and it contains a wealth of full day tutorials, advanced tutorials, talks from users, developers and Language Committee members. The Conference long break/lunch times for connecting with all the attendees. There will be Lightning talks and posters held at breaks as well as evening sessions where you can Grill the Committee/CEO on the latest draft of the OpenMP 4.1 specification which should be out for comment draft before the conference.

Currently, the first of three keynote is offered by Intel’s Chief Evangelist and Book Publisher extraordinaire James Reinders. I like to take this chance to describe the first Tutorial to be hosted by past OpenMP CEO Tim Mattson all-day on Monday Sept 28..

For this tutorial we assume you know C (OpenMP supports Fortran and C++, but we will restrict ourselves to C), are relatively new to parallel programming.The tutorial is based on Active learning! and will mix short lectures with short exercises. It offers a comprehensive overview of OpenMP from one of the most expert and entertaining instructors of OpenMP, offering everything that OpenMP Beginners to Intermediate users would want to get started in OpenMP and learn more of the deep details of tasks and loop parallelism.

If you are interested in the latest hot topics on Exascale computing or just how to program GPUs, or heterogeneous computing, then you need to attend this talk on a comparison of the latest state of OpenMP vs OpenACC will be offered by James Beyers who having been positioned in both groups offers unique insight into both. As both an OpenMP and OpenACC insider, he will present his opinion of the current status of these two directive sets for Programming “accelerators”. Insights into why some decisions were made in initial releases and why they were changed later will be used to explain the trade-offs required to achieve agreement on these complex directive sets.

One of the main aim of the OpenMPCon is for users/developers to learn the latest tips, tricks and gotchas from OpenMP Gurus and there is none better from past OpenMP Language Chair Mark Bull from EPCC. This talk will present a series of practical hints for OpenMP programmers, collected from many years experience of teaching OpenMP, and from answering questions on the OpenMP Forum. He will describe some common pitfalls, and tactics for how to avoid them, or work around them, and some helpful hints that will hopefully make your life as an OpenMP programmer that little bit easier!

If you want performance in OpenMP, then you need to attend this talk on where did your performance go. Mark Bull will give you an understanding of how and why OpenMP programs lose performance. In this talk he will attempt to enumerate all the possible ways that OpenMP programs can deliver less than ideal speedup, divided into six main categories: lack of parallelism, load imbalance, synchronisation, communication, hardware contention and compiler non-optimisation. For each category, he will explain why it happens, and offer some possible solutions.

In this blog, I have described the OpenMPCon first of three keynote, as well as the Monday full-day Beginner/Intermediate Tutorial, and three of the talks accepted at OpenMPCon 2015.

In the next set of blogs, I will update as follows

• Second keynote + next 3 accepted talks
• Wednesday Advanced Tutorial + next 3 accepted talks
• Third keynote + next 3 accepted talks
• Evening sessions + Lightning/Poster talks

Please consider attending by signing up here. In the mean time, we are looking for student and volunteers to help with the conference. Please connect with OpenMPCon if you wish to help.