The pitfalls of using OpenMP parallel for-loops

According to this discussion:

#pragma omp parallel for
for (...)
{
}

is a shortcut of

#pragma omp parallel
{ 
#pragma omp for
    for (...)
    {
    }
}

and it seems more convenient of using “#pragma omp parallel for“. But there are some pitfalls which you should pay attention to:

(1) You can’t assume the number of threads will be equal to for-loops iteration counts even it is very small. For example (The machine has only 2 cores.):

#include <omp.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
#pragma omp parallel for
    for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
        printf("thread is %d\n", omp_get_thread_num());
    }
    return 0;
}

Build and run this program:

# gcc -fopenmp parallel.c
# ./a.out
thread is 0
thread is 0
thread is 0
thread is 1
thread is 1

We can see only 2 threads are generated. Run it in another 32-core machine:

# ./a.out
thread is 1
thread is 0
thread is 2
thread is 4
thread is 3

We can see 5 threads are launched.

(2) Use num_threads clause to modify the program as following:

#include <omp.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
#pragma omp parallel for num_threads(5)
    for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
        printf("thread is %d\n", omp_get_thread_num());
    }
    return 0;
}

Rebuild and run it on original 2-core machine:

# gcc -fopenmp parallel.c
# ./a.out
thread is 2
thread is 3
thread is 4
thread is 1
thread is 0

We can see this time 5 threads are created. But you should notice the actual thread count depends the system resource. E.g., change the code like this:

#pragma omp parallel for num_threads(30000)
    for (int i = 0; i < 30000; i++) {
        printf("thread is %d\n", omp_get_thread_num());
    }

Execute it:

# ./a.out

libgomp: Thread creation failed: Resource temporarily unavailable

So we should notice the the created thread number.

#include <omp.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
#pragma omp parallel for
    for (int i = 0; i < 4; i++) {
        if (0 == omp_get_thread_num()) {
            printf("thread number is %d\n", omp_get_num_threads());
        }
    }
    return 0;
}

thread number is 32

(3) If you use C++ thread_local variable, you should take care:

#include <omp.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
    thread_local int array[5] = {0};
#pragma omp parallel for num_threads(5)
    for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
        array[i] = i + 1;
    }

    for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
        printf("array[%d] is %d\n", i, array[i]);
    }
    return 0;
}

Compile and run:

# g++ -fopenmp parallel.cpp
# ./a.out
array[0] is 1
array[1] is 0
array[2] is 0
array[3] is 0
array[4] is 0

We can see only the first element is changed, so it must be thread 0‘s work. Remove the thread_local qualifier, and rebuild. This time you get the wanted result:

# ./a.out
array[0] is 1
array[1] is 2
array[2] is 3
array[3] is 4
array[4] is 5