2.6.2 critical Construct

The critical directive identifies a construct that restricts execution of the associated structured block to a single thread at a time. The syntax of the critical directive is as follows:

#pragma omp critical [(name)]  new-linestructured-block

An optional name may be used to identify the critical region. Identifiers used to identify a critical region have external linkage and are in a name space which is separate from the name spaces used by labels, tags, members, and ordinary identifiers.

A thread waits at the beginning of a critical region until no other thread is executing a critical region (anywhere in the program) with the same name. All unnamed critical directives map to the same unspecified name.