The Auto-Parallelizing Option (APO) enables the MIPSpro C/C++ compilers to optimize parallel codes and enhances performance on multiprocessor systems. APO is controlled with command line options and source directives.

APO is integrated into the compiler; it is not a source-to-source preprocessor. Although run-time performance suffers slightly on single-processor systems, parallelized programs can be created and debugged with APO enabled.

Parallelization is the process of analyzing sequential programs for parallelism and restructuring them to run efficiently on multiprocessor systems. The goal is to minimize the overall computation time by distributing the computational workload among the available processors. Parallelization can be automatic or manual.

During automatic parallelization, the compiler analyzes and restructures the program with little or no intervention by you. With APO, the compiler automatically generates code that splits the processing of loops among multiple processors. An alternative is manual parallelization , in which you perform the parallelization using compiler directives and other programming techniques.

APO integrates automatic parallelization with other compiler optimizations, such as interprocedural analysis (IPA), optimizations for single processors, and loop nest optimization (LNO). In addition, run-time and compile-time performance is improved.

For details on using APO command line options and source directives, see the MIPSpro C++ Programmer's Guide