The Open Community Runtime (OCR) is a recent effort in the search for a runtime for extreme scale parallel systems. OCR relies on the concept of a dynamically generated task graph to ex- press the parallelism of a program. Rather than being directly used for application development, the main purpose of OCR is to become a low-level runtime for higher-level programming models and tools. Since manycore architectures like the Intel Xeon Phi are likely to play a major role in future high performance systems, we have implemented the OCR API for shared-memory machines, including the Xeon Phi. We have also implemented two benchmark applications and performed experiments to investigate the viability of the OCR as a runtime for manycores. Our initial experiments and a comparison with OpenMP indicate that OCR can be an efficient runtime system for current and emerging manycore systems.

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