Pragma driven shared memory parallelism in Zig by supporting OpenMP loop directives

TL;DR

This paper enhances the Zig compiler to support OpenMP loop directives, enabling shared memory parallelism, and demonstrates competitive performance and scalability on NASA's NAS Parallel Benchmark suite.

Contribution

It introduces OpenMP support in Zig, a language not traditionally used in HPC, and shows its performance competitiveness with Fortran and C.

Findings

Zig with OpenMP scales well on NPB benchmarks.

Zig outperforms Fortran by up to 1.25 times in certain tests.

The integration enables Zig to be a viable HPC language.

Abstract

The Zig programming language, which is designed to provide performance and safety as first class concerns, has become popular in recent years. Given that Zig is built upon LLVM, and-so enjoys many of the benefits provided by the ecosystem, including access to a rich set of backends, Zig has significant potential for high performance workloads. However, it is yet to gain acceptance in HPC and one of the reasons for this is that support for the pragma driven shared memory parallelism is missing. In this paper we describe enhancing the Zig compiler to add support for OpenMP loop directives. Then exploring performance using NASA's NAS Parallel Benchmark (NPB) suite. We demonstrate that not only does our integration of OpenMP with Zig scale comparatively to Fortran and C reference implementations of NPB, but furthermore Zig provides up to a 1.25 times performance increase compared to Fortran.