Intel® Software Network

Implementing the high performance MPI-2 specification on multiple fabrics, Intel® MPI Library 3.1 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 .

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Intel® MPI Library Flash Demo

Intel® MPI Library 3.1 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 3.1 is available for Windows* Compute Cluster Server 2003 or for Linux* in all of the following packages
• Intel MPI Library 3.1 Free Runtime Environment for pre-installation or redistribution
• Intel MPI Library 3.1 Software Development Kit including compilation tools, interface (static) libraries, debug libraries, trace libraries, include files and modules, and test codes
• Intel® Cluster Toolkit 3.1
• Intel® Cluster Toolkit Compiler Edition 3.1


Why Intel MPI Library?
• High performance MPI-2 implementation
• Linux and Windows CCS 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 – Chelsio Communications; NetEffect
• Sockets interfaces including TCP/IP over Ethernet* and other fabrics – Cisco Systems, Inc.; Intel; NetEffect; Dolphin Interconnect Solutions, Inc.; and many other vendors


Intel® MPI Library 3.1 Interoperability

Standards Based - Intel® MPI Library 3.1 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 3.1 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

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 10.1
• Allinea* Distributed Debugging Tool (DDT) 1.9.2 and higher
• Etnus 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 .NET*

Tested interoperability with Intel compilers and other Intel® Cluster Toolkit applications
• Intel® C++ or Fortran Compiler 9.1 and higher (Windows)
• Intel® C++ or Fortran Compiler 8.0+, Linux 8.1+ for Intel® 64 architecture
• GNU Compilers 3.0 and higher
• Build and Runtime Linkage with Intel® Trace Analyzer and Collector 7.1 (Linux and Windows CCS)
• Intel® Math Kernel Library 9.1 and higher (Linux and Windows CCS)


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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 Registration Center.

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Host and Target Systems
Hardware:
• IA-32, Intel® 64, or IA-64 architecture using Intel® Pentium® 4,
Intel® Xeon® processor, Intel® Itanium processor family and compatible platforms
• 1 GB of RAM - 4 GB recommended
• Minimum 100 MB of free hard disk space - 10GB recommended

Operating Systems:
• Microsoft Windows* XP
• Microsoft Windows* XP Professional x64 Edition
• Microsoft Windows* Compute Cluster Server 2003 (Intel® 64 architecture only)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux* 3.0, 4.0, or 5.0
• SUSE* Linux Enterprise Server 9 or 10
• SUSE Linux 9.0 thru 10.0 (all except Intel® 64 architecture starts at 9.1)
• HaanSoft Linux 2006 Server*
• Miracle Linux* 4.0
• Red Flag* DC Server 5.0
• Asianux* Linux 2.0
• Fedora Core 4, 5, or 6 (IA-32 and Intel 64 architectures only)
• TurboLinux*10 (IA-32 and Intel® 64 architecture)
• Mandriva/Mandrake* 10.1 (IA-32 architecture only)
• SGI* ProPack 4.0 (IA-64 architecture only) or 5.0 (IA-64 and Intel 64 architectures)


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