Multicore Application Programming available in Chinese!

This was a complete surprise to me. A box arrived on my doorstep, and inside were copies of Multicore Application Programming in Chinese. They look good, and have a glossy cover rather than the matte cover of the English version.

Article on RAW hazards

Feels like it's been a long while since I wrote up an article for OTN, so I'm pleased that I've finally got around to fixing that.

I've written about RAW hazards in the past. But I recently went through a patch of discovering them in a number of places, so I've written up a full article on them.

What is "nice" about RAW hazards is that once you recognise them for what they are (and that's the tricky bit), they are typically easy to avoid. So if you see 10 seconds of time attributable to RAW hazards in the profile, then you can often get the entire 10 seconds back by tweaking the code.

OpenMP, macros, and #define

Sometimes you need to include directives in macros. The classic example would be putting OpenMP directives into macros. The "obvious" way of doing this is:

#define BARRIER \
#pragma omp barrier

void foo()
{
  BARRIER
}

Which produces the following error:

"test.c", line 6: invalid source character: '#'
"test.c", line 6: undefined symbol: pragma
"test.c", line 6: syntax error before or at: omp

Fortunately C99 introduced the _Pragma mechanism to solve this problem. So the functioning code looks like:

#define BARRIER \
_Pragma("omp barrier")

void foo()
{
  BARRIER
}