A.12 Using the atomic Directive

 

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The following example avoids race conditions (simultaneous updates of an element of x by multiple threads) by using the atomic directive (Section 2.6.4 on page 19):

#pragma omp parallel for shared(x, y, index, n)  
    for (i=0; i<n; i++)   
    {  
        #pragma omp atomic  
            x[index[i]] += work1(i);  
        y[i] += work2(i);  
    }  

The advantage of using the atomic directive in this example is that it allows updates of two different elements of x to occur in parallel. If a critical directive (Section 2.6.2 on page 18) were used instead, then all updates to elements of x would be executed serially (though not in any guaranteed order).

Note that the atomic directive applies only to the C or C++ statement immediately following it. As a result, elements of y are not updated atomically in this example.