A Modern Memory Management System for OpenMP

Modern computers with multi-/many-core processors and accelerators feature a sophisticated and deep memory hierarchy, potentially including distinct main memory, high-bandwidth memory, texture memory and scratchpad memory. The performance characteristics of these memories are varied, and studies have demonstrated the importance of using them effectively.In this paper, we propose an extension of the OpenMP API to address the needs of programmers to efficiently optimize their applications to use new memory technologies in a platform-agnostic and portable fashion. Our proposal separately exposes the characteristics of memory resources (such as kind) and the characteristics of allocations (such as alignment), and is fully compatible with existing OpenMP constructs.