Preface
Welcome to OpenACCTM for Programmers. This book reflects a collaborative effort from 19 highly established authors, from academia and public research as well as industry. It was the common goal of the authors to assemble a collection of chapters that can be used as a systematic introduction to parallel programming using OpenACC. We designed the chapters to build on one another so that they would be useful in a classroom setting. Hence, it is highly likely that you, dear reader, are a student who signed up for this potentially daunting parallel programming class. Please rest assured that you made the right choice with this class. Compute devices no longer come in nonparallel types, and parallel programming is more important than ever.
How This Book Is Organized
It was our goal to introduce OpenACC as one way to express parallelism in small incremental steps to not overwhelm you. Here is how the book is organized.
• The first three chapters serve as an introduction to the concepts behind OpenACC and the tools for OpenACC development.
• Chapters 4–7 take you through your first real-world OpenACC programs and reveal the magic behind compiling OpenACC programs, thereby introducing additional concepts.
• Chapter 8–10 cover advanced topics, such as alternatives to OpenACC, low-level device interaction, multidevice programming, and task parallelism.
• Chapters 11 and 12 serve as a look into the diverse field of research in OpenACC implementation of potential new language features.
Most chapters contain a few exercises at the end to review the chapter contents. The solutions as well as the code examples used in the chapters are available online at https://github.com/OpenACCUserGroup/openacc_concept_strategies_book. This URL also presents a slide deck for each chapter to help teachers kick-start their classes.
Join OpenACC User Group and Register on Informit.com
Because it has been our pleasure to work with so many friends from the (extended) OpenACC family on this book, we also want to extend an invitation to you to join the OpenACC User Group and become a family member as well. You can find access to all OpenACC resources at https://www.openacc.org.