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Intel® MPI Library 3.2
for Linux* or Windows*
 Overview

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 Features
 System Requirements

Overview
Intel® MPI Library

Implementing the high performance MPI-2 specification on multiple fabrics, Intel® MPI Library 3.2 focuses on making applications perform better on IA based clusters. Intel MPI Library enables you to quickly deliver maximum end user performance even if you change or upgrade to new interconnects, without requiring major changes to the software or to the operating environment. Intel also provides a free runtime environment kit for products developed with the Intel MPI library.

Intel® MPI Library Flash Demo

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Features

Intel® MPI Library 3.2 is a multi-fabric message passing library that implements the Message Passing Interface, v2 (MPI-2) specification. It provides a standard library across Intel® platforms that:

Focuses on making applications perform best on IA based clusters

Enables adoption of the MPI-2 functions as the customer needs dictate

Delivers best in class performance for enterprise, divisional, departmental and workgroup high performance computing

Intel® MPI Library 3.2 is available for Windows* or for Linux* in all of the following packages

Intel MPI Library 3.2 Free Runtime Environment for pre-installation or redistribution

Intel MPI Library 3.2 Software Development Kit including compilation tools, interface (static) libraries, debug libraries, trace libraries, include files and modules, and test codes

Intel® Cluster Toolkit 3.2

Intel® Cluster Toolkit Compiler Edition 3.2

What's New?

Automatic application-specific performance tuning

Faster startup and improved collective operation algorithms for even more performance

Greater scalability over sockets and shared memory

Enhanced flexibility and control over:
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Shared memory segment size for ease-of-use

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OS, compiler, Python, and DAPL check for higher scalability

Added support for:
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Intel® Compiler 11.0

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Microsoft Windows* HPC 2008 and Vista

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DAPL 2.0

Loadable 3rd party process manager (PMI) libraries for tighter integration with leading resource schedulers

Why Intel MPI Library?

High performance MPI-2 implementation

Linux and Windows support

Interconnect independence

Smart fabric selection

Easy installation

Free Runtime Environment

Close integration with the Intel and 3rd party development tools

Internet based licensing and technical support

Intel® MPI Library Supports Multiple Hardware Fabrics
Whether you need to run TCP sockets, shared memory, or one of many DAPL-based interconnects, including InfiniBand, Myrinet*, and Quadrics, Intel® MPI Library covers all your configurations by providing an accelerated universal, multi-fabric layer for fast interconnects via the Direct Access Programming Library (DAPL) methodology (Figure 1). Develop MPI code independent of the fabric, knowing it will run efficiently on whatever fabric is chosen by the user at runtime.


Figure 1. Intel® MPI Library and DAPL-based interconnects multi-fabric functionality

Intel MPI Library dynamically establishes the connection, but only when needed, which reduces the memory footprint. It also automatically chooses the fastest transport available. Memory requirements are also reduced by several methods including a two phase communication buffer enlargement capability which allocates only the memory space actually required.

The fallback to sockets at job startup avoids the chance of execution failure even if the interconnect selection fails. This is especially helpful for batch computing. And any products developed with Intel MPI Library are assured run time compatibility since your users can download Intel’s free runtime environment kit. Application performance can also be increased via the large message bandwidth advantage from the optional use of DAPL inside a multi-core or SMP node.

Supported fabrics include:

Infiniband – Mellanox Technologies, Inc; Cisco Systems, Inc.; Voltaire; Qlogic

Myrinet* – Myricom, Inc.

QsNet*, QsNetII – Quadrics, Ltd.

NUMAlink™ – Silicon Graphics, Inc.

10 GbE iWarp* Adapters – NetEffect

Sockets interfaces including TCP/IP over Ethernet* and other fabrics – Cisco Systems, Inc.; Intel; NetEffect; Dolphin Interconnect Solutions, Inc.; and many other vendors

The following table provides some common DAPL interfaces and links to the latest drivers:

DAPL Interfaces
Company Product Driver Source
Cisco Systems, Inc. PCI host channel adapters  http://www.openfabrics.org/downloads.htm
SilverStorm Technologies, Inc. InfiniBand Contact the SilverStorm Support team for the latest version of the drivers (http://www.silverstorm.com)
Mellanox Technologies, Inc. InfiniBand  http://www.mellanox.com/products/ofed.php
Myricom, Inc. Myrinet* http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/dapl-myrinet
QLogic Infinipath 7000  http://www.openfabrics.org/downloads.htm
Quadrics Ltd. QsNet, QsNet II http://www.quadrics.com/linux
Silicon Graphics*, Inc. SGI ProPack* 5  http://www.sgi.com/products/software/linux/propack.html
Voltaire InfiniBand http://www.voltaire.com/SupportAndServices/Drivers (Login required)
Berkley Socket Interfaces
Company Product Driver Source
Dolphin Interconnect Solutions Inc. Dolphin SCI* Contact the Dolphin ICS Support Team for the latest version of the drivers (http://www.dolphinics.com/support/)
Intel Intel® PRO Network Products (Ethernet) http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldId=4275&lang=eng
NetEffect NetEffect 10Gbps iWARP* Ethernet Channel Adapter  Contact the NetEffect Support Team for the latest version of the
drivers (http://www.neteffect.com/support-overview.php)
Shared Memory Systems
Company Product Driver Source
Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. HP Integrity* Server Family  http://welcome.hp.com/country/us/en/support.html

Intel® MPI Library 3.2 Interoperability

Standards Based

Intel® MPI Library 3.2 is based on Argonne National Laboratory's MPICH-2 implementation and is targeted toward industry-wide standardization of the MPI-2 ABI with maximum performance. All MPI-1 features are supported, plus many MPI-2 features including the following:

Active target one-sided communication

Passive target one-sided communication

Generalized requests

Full thread support

File I/O

Simplified Integration with leading Linux Job Schedulers

Intel MPI Library 3.2 can be easily integrated with:

Platform LSF 6.1 and higher

Altair PBS Pro* 7.1 and higher

OpenPBS* 2.3

Torque* 1.2.0 and higher

Parallelnavi* NQS* for Linux V2.0L10 and higher

Parallelnavi for Linux Advanced Edition V1.0L10A and higher

NetBatch* 6.x and higher

SLURM* 1.2.21 and higher

Sun* Grid Engine* 1.6 and higher

Support for Process Managers
Intel MPI Library automatically recognizes PMI extension support and provides backward compatibility with older process managers.

Works with leading Linux Parallel Debuggers
Intel MPI Library can be integrated at job startup or as a process attachment. It also provides message queue browsing support and is interoperable with:

Intel® Debugger 9.1 and higher

Allinea* Distributed Debugging Tool (DDT) 1.9.2 and higher

TotalView Technologies* TotalView* debugger 6.8 and higher

GNU* debuggers

Valgrind* 3.2.3 (including suppression rules)

Integrated Programming Environments

Eclipse PTP* 1.0 GUI process launcher for Linux

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, 2008 and .NET*

Tested interoperability with Intel compilers and other Intel® Cluster Toolkit applications

Intel® C++ or Fortran Compiler 9.1 and higher

GNU Compilers 3.3 and higher

Build and Runtime Linkage with Intel® Trace Analyzer and Collector 7.2 (Linux and Windows)

Intel® Math Kernel Library 9.1 and higher (Linux and Windows)

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Support

With the purchase of Intel® Software Development Products, you will receive one year of technical support and product updates from Intel® Premier Support, our interactive issue management and communication Web site. This premium support service allows you to submit questions, download product updates, and access technical notes, application notes, and other documentation. For more information, visit the Intel® Software Development Products Registration Center.

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System Requirements

Hardware
Minimum Requirements

IA-32, Intel® 64 or IA-64 (formerly Itanium) architecture-based system. Examples of such Intel processors are:

Intel® Pentium® 4 processor, or
Intel® Xeon® processor, or
Intel® Itanium® processor, or
Intel® Core™2 Duo processor (example of Intel® 64 architecture)

Note that it is assumed that the processors listed above are configured into homogeneous clusters

4 GB of RAM (8 GB of RAM recommended)

1 GB of hard disk space (10 GB of space recommended)


Operating System Support

All three architectures

Red Hat* Enterprise Linux* 4.0, 5.0

SUSE* Linux Enterprise Server* (SLES) 9, 10

IA-32 and Intel 64 architectures

Microsoft* Windows Vista

Intel® 64 and IA-64 architectures

SGI ProPack* 5

IA-32 architecture only Microsoft Windows* XP
Intel® 64 architecture only

Red Hat Fedora Core* 7 through 8

cAos* 2

CentOS* 4.6, 5.1

openSuSE* Linux* 10.3

Microsoft* Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003*

Microsoft* Windows Server 2003*

Microsoft* Windows XP Professional x64 Edition*

Microsoft* Windows HPC Server 2008*

Microsoft* Windows Server 2008*

Other Supported Software
Intel® MPI Benchmarks
Intel® Math Kernel Library
Intel® Trace Analyzer and Collector
Intel® C++ Compiler
Intel® Fortran Compiler
Microsoft* Visual Studio and Visual C++ Compilers
GNU C, C++, and FORTRAN77 Compilers
OpenFabrics* Enterprise Distribution (OFED*)

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Intel provides both the tools and support to enhance the performance, functionality and efficiency of software applications.
Compatible with leading Windows* and Linux* development environments, Intel® Software Development Products are the fastest and easiest way to take advantage of the latest features of Intel processors. Intel Software Development Products are designed for use in the full development cycle, and include Intel® Performance Libraries, Intel Compilers (C++, Fortran for Windows and Linux), Intel® VTune™ Analyzer, Intel® Threading Tools and Intel® Cluster Tools.
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