[Numpy-discussion] Openmp support (was numpy's future (1.1 and beyond): which direction(s) ?)

[David Cournapeau]

Anne Archibald wrote:
>
> Actually, there are a few places where a parallel for would serve to
> accelerate all ufuncs. There are build issues, yes, though they are
> mild;

Maybe, maybe not. Anyway, I said that I would step in to resolve those 
issues if someone else does the coding.

>  we would also want to provide some API to turn parallelization
> on and off, and we'd have to verify that OpenMP did not slow down
> small arrays, but that would be it. (And I suspect that OpenMP is
> smart enough to use single threads without locking when multiple
> threads won't help. Certainly all the information is available to
> OpenMP to make such decisions.)
>   

How so ? Maybe you're right, but that's not so obvious to me. But since 
several people seem to know openMP and are eager to add it to numpy, it 
should be easy to add it to numpy: all they have to do it getting numpy 
sources from svn, and start coding :) With numscons at least, they can 
manually add the -fopenmp and -lgomp flags from the command line to 
quickly do a prototype (it should not be much more difficult with 
distutils).

cheers,

David