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 straightway week. More than a few have jumped the gun with product announcements this week, including chipmaker Intel.

The Platform Computing MPI 8

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 such a case the performance differences between Intel and Platform 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.

The Cluster Studio XE bundle includes the Intel v12.1 compilers that were launched in September, which offered between 22 and 27 per cent better performance on Fortran benchmarks and from 6 to 11 per cent on C/C++ integer performance compared to the v12.0 releases running on Linux and Windows machines. C/C++ floating performance improvements were a few points. Intel claims it has a considerable performance advantage over other compilers - anywhere from 21 to 47 per cent faster code execution on C, C++, and Fortran tests. And that performance is not just tied to Intel's own Xeon processors.

Perhaps more significantly, on Fortran, Intel now believes it has the performance edge over Portland Group 11.4 and Absoft 11.1 on either Windows or Linux machines. The performance jump is particularly acute on Windows machines running C++.

The normal Cluster Studio stack

The normal Cluster Studio stack, which includes the Intel compilers as then as the math and clustering libraries, costs $1,849 per developer on a Linux workstation and $1,499 per developer on a Windows workstation. There is no runtime or royalty charge for having the tools run on a parallel x86 cluster. If you want to go all the way to the Cluster Studio XE stack, at that time you pay $2,849 per developer on Linux and $2,499 on Windows. Yes, the Windows versions are cheaper. ®

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