Hello, My name is Aryan Jain, and I am a computer science student at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). I am writing to express my interest in contributing to the "Libgomp Optimizations for Scheduler Guided OpenMP Execution in Cloud VMs" project as a GSoC 2026 contributor.
I have been preparing by going through the following steps: - Watched Himadri's FOSDEM 2026 talk on the project and read through the slides. I found the Phantom vCPU concept and the pv-barrier-sync approach very interesting, particularly how paravirtualized scheduling insights can inform per-thread spin vs. block decisions at barriers. - Successfully checked out the GCC source from Git and built it from source using --disable-bootstrap. Ran the testsuite. - Wrote and compiled a few basic OpenMP programs with -fopenmp to familiarize myself with parallel regions, barriers, and environment variables like OMP_NUM_THREADS and OMP_WAIT_POLICY. - Browsed the libgomp source code, specifically parallel.c (gomp_resolve_num_threads), env.c (environment variable parsing), and the barrier implementation. My background is in C/C++ systems programming. I have experience with concurrency, low-latency systems design, and GPU programming (CUDA on NVIDIA A100s). I am comfortable working with large codebases and have a solid understanding of OS scheduling concepts. I have a few questions to help me get started: 1. Are there any additional papers or resources beyond the FOSDEM talk that would help me understand the Phantom Tracker mechanism in more depth? 2. Is there a good starter task or small bug fix in the libgomp area that I could work on to familiarize myself with the contribution workflow? 3. For the GOMP_DYNAMIC_POLICY deliverable , would the paravirtualized scheduling information come through an existing kernel interface (e.g., /proc or a hypercall), or is that part of what needs to be designed? I look forward to engaging with the community and would appreciate any guidance. Best regards, Aryan Jain.
