OpenMP
OpenMP ñ an agreement (not a formal standard) between vendors and users for parallelising codes on (virtual) shared memory systems.
Widely available - currently the most portable shared memory parallel programming paradigm.
Advantages over message passing:
- Can parallelise code incrementally.
- Shorter time to produce a parallel version.
- Can fairly easily test alternatives.
- Final code is likely to be easily recognisable from the serial code, and not too much longer.
- => Easier!