[Beowulf] Intel compilers V8

[Serguei.Patchkovskii at sympatico.ca]

On 12 Jul 2004 at 8:34, John Hearns wrote:

> For those who use them, are most people using version 8 of the
> Intel compilers? Are there any known issues?

For production work, I would recommend against using version 8 of the intel
compilers. They sort of work, provided that you get the most recent update from
Intel support - however, there are still many issues with numerical accuracy
at high optimization levels. To intel's credit, this is a huge improvement compared to 
the original 8.0 release - that one was either crashing or producing wrong code for
most non-trivial applications.

Unless your code is very similar to one of the SPEC benchmarks, 8.0 may also 
generate slower code, compared to ifc 7.1, even though 8.0 presumably includes 
much better high-level optimizers. The nice debugging features (try -C -d2, and you'll 
see waht I mean) of 7.1 are largerly missing in 8.0, too. I also gave up on OpenMP in 
8.0, while 7.1's is working fine (but is limited to OMP 1.1).

To put it very mildly, 8.0 is not an improvement over 7.1

Serguei