Hi Stuart, On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 5:27 AM, Stuart Barkley <[email protected]> wrote:
> What has been peoples experience with these versus GCC/OpenMPI? Do > you see significant performance improvements? About GCC vs icc: yes, you most likely will see a nice performance improvement. The intel for example makes much more aggressive use of vector extensions (sse, avx) which can result in a tremendous performance increase. > On the Intel web site, I see "Intel Parallel Studio XE 2015 (Cluster > edition)". Is this the software supported in the intel-2015a > toolchain? Yes, the 'Parallel Studio' is just a collection of software: the compilers, mpi, lapack/blas, vtune, etc. > I'm curious about the differences between intel-2015a, intel-2015-02 > and ictce-7.3.5 toolchains? Are these just for different Intel > releases (it seem to be mostly version numbers). All seem to be > referenced by recent software, but intel-2015a has the most referrers. Wel, the most recent one is intel-2015.02 but that's more of a try out. Stick with intel-2015a. The ictce toolchain is identical but it doesn't include the GCC module. This is actually wrong and the toolchain should be changed. It's more of a left over from before we used the naming convention intel and foss. > The intel-2015a toolchain seems to also depend upon GCC-4.9.3 (just > from reading the .eb files). Is there some reason for this? Yes, intel only supplies a compiler, not the standard headers. You need GCC for that. Until recently, this was no problem as it silently used the system installed headers but with the C++11 this became an issue: the system headers were usually too old to support C++11, resulting in all kinds of complex errors. In short: you always need GCC when using the intel compilers. As EB want a complete reproducible build stack, we also build GCC for the intel toolchain. > As a side note: I've been converting my things to use the foss-2015a > toolchain (from goolf-1.4.10) and this appears to be working out. I > initially did a --try-toolchain build and most things seemed to build. > So far, I'm just cribbing off of existing .eb files and changing the > toolchain in these one-by-one and adding them to my easyconfig > directory. Is there really any other better way? I'm not looking > forward to future easybuild releases where I need to compare renamed > .eb files against the original ones to pick up significant changes. Well, not really. The easyconfig format 2 should handle this but that's for the far future. The version number of the actually software will change, in that way you can track changes with newer EB releases? > If I should add the intel-2015a toolchain, I also really don't want to > create another couple dozen .eb files with just the toolchain change > (although this time it would be a little simpler rename/sed commands). If you have .eb files for foss, it should no problem to use --try-toolchain=intel,2015a to get it to work. Ward
