Timer Control

Timer Control

The following routines are used to control the state of the timers. A timer must be started and stopped for a timing block to be counted and can only be paused after it has been started and continued after it has been paused for the time to be valid. These states are not checked in the optimised version but there is a debug version available in which these states are checked and any erroneous states are reported.

OpenMP: Once created, timers provide no thread protection mechanisms such that no two threads should access the same timer at the same time. If multiple access is needed a serialisation mechanism like a barrier or critical region should separate the actions.