Thread affinity with OpenMP 4.0

Thread affinity can prevent an MPI process or OpenMP thread from migrating to a different hardware resource. Process/thread migration may cause a significant performance decrease of a code. The OpenMP 4.0 standard introduced affinity settings controlled by OMP_PLACES and OMP_PROC_BIND environment variables.

• OMP_PLACES: specifies hardware resources. The value can be either an abstract name describing a list of places or an explicit list of places. Choices are threads, cores, or sockets
  • threads : Each place corresponds to a single hardware thread on the target  machine. 
  • cores : Each place corresponds to a single core (having one or more  hardware threads) on the target machine.
  • sockets : Each place corresponds to a single socket (consisting of one or  more cores) on the target machine.
  • A list with explicit place values: such as"{0,1,2,3},{4,5,6,7},{8,9,10,11},{12,13,14,15}” 
• OMP_PROC_BIND : controls how OpenMP threads are bound to resources. Values  for OMP_PROC_BIND include close, spread and master.
  • spread: Bind threads as evenly distributed (spread) as possible
  • close: Bind threads close to the master thread while still distributing threads for load balancing, wrap around once each place receives one  thread
  • master : Bind threads the same place as the master thread