[Beowulf] Quad-Core Parallelism

[James Cownie]

On 16 Nov 2007, at 15:40, Donald Shillady wrote:

>  The question is whether ESSL or Parallel-ESSL is needed to do true  
> parallel computing on a Quad-core chip?  Basically I would like to  
> know if anyone is working on making a Quad-core CPU parallel  
> (preferably f77 or f99) under RedHat LINUX?  If I install RedHat  
> LINUX on a Quad-core CPU (thus avoiding a high speed switch) what  
> would be needed to run parallel f77, a new compiler?

The Intel "Math Kernel LIbrary" (which includes BLAS and a lot of  
other goodies) http://www.intel.com/cd/software/products/asmo-na/eng/ 
307757.htm
has many routines which are internally parallelized for multi-core  
machines.

So, if you're using BLAS you should be able just to link against  
these and get a benefit which depends on how much of your execution  
time was spent in the library routines.

The Intel compilers also include an auto-par switch, so there's some  
chance that recompiling with that might help too, and, of course also  
include OpenMP support.

(Disclaimer: I work for Intel, and haven't used MKL or auto-par  
myself, so as ever YMMV)

--
-- Jim
--
James Cownie <jcownie at cantab.net>