Parallelization: pthreads or OpenMP?

Question

Most people in scientific computing use OpenMP as a quasi-standard when it comes to shared memory parallelization.

Is there any reason (other than readability) to u

Answer 1

OpenMP is ideal when you need to perform the same task in parallel (that is, on multiple data), a kind of SIMD machine (single-instruction multiple-data).

Pthreads is needed when you want to perform (quite different) tasks in parallel such as, for example, reading data in one thread and interacting with the user in another thread.

See this page:

http://berenger.eu/blog/c-cpp-openmp-vs-pthread-openmp-or-posix-thread/