OpenMP 3.1 specification released

OpenMP is a great way to produce parallel applications with the minimal amount of work. The 3.1 specification came out a couple of days ago. As should be apparent from the version number, its more incremental than significant. The significant changes I see are:

• Support for min and max reductions in C/C++. This was a frustrating omission from the previous versions, so I'm pleased to see that fixed here.
• Support for thread binding. The specification introduces OMP_PROC_BIND which binds threads to cores. This is rather similar to the original SUNW_MP_PROCBIND in Studio, which only took true or false, more recent compilers allow a much finer granularity of control. Still "true" or "false" is a good start!