Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Intel Compiler on Linux

  • Make sure you have access to root. (eg: sudo su root, passwd)
  • Make sure you have your build environment set up. eg:

    sudo apt-get install gcc
    sudo apt-get install build-essential
    sudo apt-get install g++
    sudo apt-get install rpm
    
  • ICC requires older standard C libraries, libstdc++5, so you can get them for Ubuntu from:
    Package: libstdc++5. You just need to download the i386 package. (eg from the Australian mirror, by using wget [url]), and then install it, eg: "sudo dpkg -i libstdc++5_3.3.6-18_i386.deb".
    If you don't do this you may get the following error messages:

    Missing critical pre-requisite
    -- missing system commands
    
    The following required for installation commands are missing:
    libstdc++.so.5 ( library)
    
  • Download ICC
  • Unzip (tar -xvf filename)
  • ./install.sh
  • Choose to install for all (1)
  • Read "welcome" message follow instructions for licence, etc.
  • Activate your software (1) and provide the serial number that came in your email. You should see "Activation Completed Successfully"
  • Install the software (requires 3.35 gigs). You should see a message "Checking the prerequisites. It can take several minutes. Please wait…".
  • You might see:

    Missing optional pre-requisite
    -- No compatible Java* Runtime Environment (JRE) found
    -- operating system type is not supported.
    -- system glibc or kernel version not supported or not detectable
    -- binutils version not supported or not detectable
    
    The JRE you need for the visual debugger, otherwise you can safely continue.
  • The installer then asks which components to install, eg "Intel(R) C++ Compiler Professional Edition for Linux*", just press "1. Install" to continue. It should state "component installed successfully."
  • Setup the paths, you can use the iccvars.sh in /opt/intel/Compiler/11.1/073/bin to setup everything for you. (eg: source /opt/intel/Compiler/11.1/073/bin/iccvars.sh ia32). You may wish to put it into your .bashrc file.
  • That's it! Type "icc" to invoke for C files or "icpc" for C++ files. For standard makefiles use "make CXX=icpc"
On a 1GHz VIA Esther processor, GCC 4.4.1, with -O2 -march=c3-2:
real 0m16.855s
user 0m16.849s
sys 0m0.004s
And, with ICC 11.1, with -O2:
real 0m11.369s
user 0m11.361s
sys 0m0.008s

An instant 45% speedup! Unfortunately not all code makes such a big change, some other compute-intensive code I tested only got a 4% speedup. In any case I'd say its worth it!

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