OpenMP in practice

Is OpenMP actually usable? I had a very simply parallelizable problem written in C that executed fast enough (under 2 minutes), but I thought it would make a nice benchmark. Basically, it had n (roughly equally sized, n being < 200) sections that could be executed totally independently, and only needed a join at the end.

I installed the latest gcc with the OpenMP `task' support to test it, and the execution got only around five seconds faster compared to the non-MP version with the same compiler. Moreover, only one of the two CPUs was active during the #ompd part. This stuff is supposed to be simple. What gives?

>>8
Well, that's exactly what I did, and gcc spouted out some nonsense that pretty much made it clear that it implements OpenMP as a dirty hack.

of course my assumption is that you're not retarded.
At least it seems that you've eased on your assumptions by now.