How does OpenMP handle nested loops?

Question

Does the following code just parallelize the first (outer) loops, or it parallelize the entire nested loops?

    #pragma omp parallel for
    for (int i=0;i<N;i++)
    { 
      for (int j=0;j<M;j++)
      {
       //do task(i,j)//
      }
    }

I just want to make sure if the above code will parallelize the entire nested for-loops (thus one thread directly related task(i,j)), or it only parallelizes the outer for-loop (thus it ensures that, for each parrallel thread with loop index i, its inner loop will be done sequentially in a single thread, which is very import).

Answer 1

The lines you have written will parallelize only the outer loop. To parallelize both you need to add a collapse clause:

#pragma omp parallel for collapse(2)
    for (int i=0;i<N;i++)
    { 
      for (int j=0;j<M;j++)
      {
       //do task(i,j)//
      }
    }

You may want to check OpenMP 3.1 specifications (sec 2.5.1) for more details.