Towards an Event-Driven Programming Model for OpenMP

The event-driven programming pattern is pervasive in a wide range of modern software applications. Unfortunately, it is not easy to achieve good performance and responsiveness when developing event-driven applications. Traditional approaches require a great amount of programmer effort to restructure and refactor code, to achieve the performance speedup from parallelism and asynchronization. Not only does this restructuring require a lot of development time, it also makes the code harder to debug and understand. We propose an asynchronous programming model based on the philosophy of OpenMP, which does not require code restructuring of the original sequential code. This asynchronous programming model is complementary to the existing OpenMP fork-join model. The coexistence of the two models has potential to decrease developing time for parallel event-driven programs, since it avoids major code refactoring. In addition to its programming simplicity, evaluations show that this approach achieves good performance improvements consistent with more traditional event-driven parallelization.