Intel Compiler

Intel has rebranded its compilers and libraries and allows a free version for everyone.

The new name is Intel oneAPI. [1]

We have installed the Base and HPC package in the shared folder

/home/software/intel/oneapi

You can use it by sourcing the following file:

. /home/software/intel/oneapi/setvars.sh

Unfortunately this script take some seconds to complete, it is not recommended to include it into the bashrc. We will look for a faster solution for the use in the bashrc.

Implicit parallelization

This version of MKL has internal parallel code (based on openMP) which uses all CPUs in the system. This is fine on the desktop as it will speed up your caluclation. But on the compute nodes this will conflict with other jobs running on the same machine. Therefore you have to restrict the number CPUs used to the number of allocated slots in SGE. Your can do this by defining the following environment variable:

 export OMP_NUM_THREADS=x

where x is the number of allocated slots. Using 1 means traditional serial processing. You should benchmark your program how many parallel threads will give a reasonable performance per CPU value.

Documentation

The comprehensive set of Intel documentation will be found under /home/software/intel/documentation_2018/en.