> While standardization and support for [threaded] APIs has come a long way, their use is still predominantly restricted to system programmers as opposed to application programmers. One of the reasons for this is that APIs such as Pthreads are considered to be low-level primitives. Conventional wisdom indicates that a large class of applications can be efficiently supported by higher level constructs (or directives) which rid the programmer of the mechanics of manipulating threads. Such directive-based languages have existed for a long time, but only recently have standardization efforts succeeded in the form of OpenMP. OpenMP is an API that can be used with FORTRAN, C, and C++ for programming shared address space machines. OpenMP directives provide support for concurrency, synchronization, and data handling while obviating the need for explicitly setting up mutexes, condition variables, data scope, and initialization.
From Introduction to Parallel Computing
OpenMP: http://www.openmp.org/