Compiler functionality for supporting translation of OpenMP falls into two broad categories. The first category deals with the translation of the OpenMP work sharing constructs to the micro-tasking format. This entails the extraction of the work sharing code to separate microtasking subroutines and insertion of the corresponding function calls and synchronization. Cetus provides an API sufficient for these transformations. The second category deals with the translation of the data clauses, which requires support for accessing and modifying symbol table entries. Cetus provides several ways in which the pass writer can access the symbol table to add and delete symbols or change their scope.

There are currently two different OpenMP translators which have been implemented using Cetus. Both of these use the same OpenMP front end. One translator generates code for shared-memory systems using the POSIX threads API. The other translator targets software distributed shared memory systems and was developed as part of a project to extend OpenMP to cluster systems. Although the entire OpenMP 2.0 specification is not supported yet, the translators are powerful enough to handle benchmarks such as 330.art_m and 320.equake_m from the SPEC OMPM2001 suite.