Intel stretches HPC dev tools across chubby clusters

SC11 Supercomputing hardware and software vendors are getting impatient for the SC11 supercomputing conference in Seattle, which kicks off next week. More than a few have jumped the gun with product announcements this week, including chipmaker Intel.

No, Intel is not going to launch its "Sandy Bridge-EP" Xeon E5 processors, which are expected early next year. But the new Cluster Studio XE toolset for HPC customers will help those lucky few HPC and cloud shops that have been able to get systems this year to squeeze more performance out of their Xeon E5 clusters.

The Cluster Studio XE stack includes a slew of Intel tools for creating, tuning, and monitoring parallel applications running on x86-based parallel clusters. Intel had already been selling a set of application tools called Cluster Studio, which bundled up the chip giant's C, C++, and Fortran compilers, its rendition of the message passing interface (MPI) messaging protocol that allows server nodes to share work, and various math and multithreading libraries to goose the performance of applications.

With the XE (Extended Edition) of the HPC cluster tools, Intel is goosing the performance of the MPI library, and claims its MPI 4.0.3 stack is anywhere from 3.3 to 6.5 times as fast as the OpenMPI 1.5.4 and MVAPICH2 1.6 MPI stacks from the open source community. Benchmark tests were done on a 64-node system running 768 processes and linked by InfiniBand switches.

Intel tested the Platform Computing MPI 8.1.1 stack against the three MPI stacks listed above, only this time on an eight-mode system; in this case the performance differences between Intel and Platform (which is now owned by IBM) were not huge. With the Microsoft MPI 3.2 stack on the same iron, the Intel MPI stack running on Windows servers was anywhere from 2.17 to 2.74 times faster than the Microsoft MPI.

Read full story at theregister.co.uk

Product Review: PGI Workstation

PGI Workstation™ is PGI's single-user scientific and engineering compilers and tools product. PGI Workstation is available in three language versions;

• PGI Fortran Workstation—Fortran only 
• PGI C/C++ Workstation—C and C++ only 
• PGI Fortran/C/C++ Workstation—combined Fortran and C/C++ 

PGI Fortran Workstation includes The Portland Group's native parallelizing/optimizing FORTRAN 77, Fortran 90/95/03 and HPF compilers for 64-bit x64 and 32-bit x86 processor-based Linux, Apple Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows workstations. PGI Fortran Workstation provides the features, quality, and reliability necessary for developing and maintaining advanced scientific and technical applications.

PGI parallel compilers and tools harness the full power of x64+GPU systems for science and engineering applications. PGI’s industry-leading performance, reliability, native multi-core and OpenMP support, GPGPU programming, and parallel-capable graphical debugging and profiling tools provide a complete state-of-the art programming environment for scientists and engineers. PGI’s support for legacy language and programming features ensures that existing applications will port easily and quickly to the latest-generation multi-core x64+GPU processor-based systems.

PGI C/C++ Workstation includes The Portland Group's native parallelizing/optimizing OpenMP C++ and ANSI C compilers. The C++ compiler closely tracks the proposed ANSI standard and is compatible with cfront versions 2 and 3. All C++ functions are compatible with Fortran and C functions, so you can compose programs from components written in all three languages.

PGI Workstation includes the OpenMP and MPI enabled PGDBG parallel debugger and PGPROF performance profiler that can debug and profile up to eight local MPI processes. PGI Workstation also includes several versions of precompiled MPICH message passing libraries.

PGI Workstation includes a single user node-locked license for Linux, Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows. Volume packs of five or more single user node-locked licenses are also available.

Volume packs are multi-platform; licenses may be mixed by operating system up to the maximum count. PGI Server offers the same features as PGI Workstation but includes a multi-user network floating license.

PGI Workstation for both Mac OS X and Windows consists of command-level versions of the PGI compilers and both command-level and graphical versions of the PGDBG debugger and PGPROF performance profiler. An integrated development environment (IDE) is neither provided nor supported. As a separate product, PGI Visual Fortran fully integrates PGI Fortran compilers and tools into Microsoft Windows using Microsoft Visual Studio.

This product targets 64-bit x64 and 32-bit x86 workstations with one or more single core or multi-core microprocessors.

(Detailed product info can be obtained from manufacturers web pages)