Does OpenMP supports work stealing mechanism?

Question

I am working with sources of gcc-4.7.4 compiler. I must to learn work of OpenMP libraries and I have read documentations of different versions of OpenMP and I didn't find any information about wok stealing mechanism. Is that true, that OpenMP does not support work stealing mechanism?

Answer 1

OpenMP takes almost all of the responsibility for work scheduling out of the hands of the programmer. There is no explicit support for work-stealing, nor any other scheduling policy save for specifying how loop iterations are to be divided across processors.

However, an OpenMP implementation may choose to use work-stealing. The approach would be entirely suitable for the explicit task construct that OpenMP supports. Equally, an implementation may choose another scheduling approach.

I have read that the gcc implementation does use work-stealing, but it's not something I've looked into and I may be wrong.