Can installations of Intel compilers and other tools V11.1 co-exist with the last gen of compilers 12.1?

[drMikeT]

We have installed the 11.1 professional compiler set along with all the Intel developer tools as of November 2010.

I was wondering if the latest compiler set (12.1) and the other tools released around the same time, could be installed alongside the older Intel suite. One concern is that the new set has a new license file and I am not sure if I installing the new license will interrupt access to the older set.

Do I have to make any special arrangements in order to have the two tool sets coexist ?

thanks

Michael

[Todd_R_Intel · Accepted solution]

No, that should not be a problem. The new license you will get covers the old versions and the new.

Regards,
Todd

[drMikeT]

Thanks Toddd, this is good news as the 11.1 is our production environmnet (tons of code built against it) and 12.1 is unsruprisigly our evaluation one....

Michael

[WSinc]

On that topic, I was wondering how one would ask the VS 2008 to choose which compiler to use, the older one
(11.1) or the newest one.

In other words, is there a procedure to force the VS to use the older compiler
for compilation of newly modified source code? Or a rebuild, for example?

One may wish to compare their perfomances, or is there is a problem using the
newest one, one may wish to revert back until it is fixed.

Any ideas?

Thanks; Bill S.

[Todd_R_Intel]

Sounds like a great question, but it's not really in my area of expertise. I'll see about transfering this question over to the Compiler forums.

-Todd

[TimP]

If you integrate both compilers into the same Visual Studio, normally it would default to the newer compiler, but you can select the other on the pull-down menu. There's a recent answer about this on the Fortran windows forum. As I see in my own copy, tools>options>intel c++>compilers shows you the selection menu.
By the way, we haven't reached 12.1 yet; there is "xe 2011" (12.0) update 1.

[drMikeT]

We are interested in the Linux environmnet exclusively. I assume that different compiler set versions can co-exist in Linux using the same license server, correct? I have an up-to-date license for the 12.1 set but I would like to have both 11.1 and 12.1 be accessible and selectable by users who have reasons to use on or the other.

Another Question: are the 12.1 tools ready for production use at the moment? We use Intel compiler set to built MPI stacks and then complex software on top of it. It would not be so efficient for us to say keep building the dependent software several times....

thanks to all for the answers.

Michael

[TimP]

Yes, the supported way of choosing between 11.1 and "12.0" linux compilers is by sourceing the environment variable setting script in the corresponding compiler installation. There may be a problem in coexistence of "12.0" (xe 2011) updates 0 and 1, where the last one installed in the default path blocks the earlier one, but that can be overcome by choosing a new installation path. For example, I chose /opt/xeon/ instead of /opt/intel/ for my update 1 installation. This problem doesn't arise between 11.1 and the new compiler.
I believe the current compiler is as well tested as 11.1 (better, on the distros which are newly designated as supported). The imf-arch-consistency option should help with numerical consistency between different CPU types. Needless to say, there would be individual points on which one or the other may be better, and most developers would make a full round of QA comparisons between old and new compilers.
If you were to take full advantage of the new compiler, you might set a consistency option such as '-fp-model source', then use the #pragma simd on C loops for which vectorization is missed. My personal reservation is against the new nested loop transformations at -O3.
You may be able to change path to the new compiler without rebuilding the existing MPI, if you built it with simply icc and icpc (no full path) as the compiler, as the new compiler and libraries are compatible with the earlier object files.

[drMikeT]

I will give it a test as time permits. We have installed the 11.1 Intel stack under /global/FS/.../Intel/... and I plan to install the 12.1 ones under /global/FS/.../IntelXE/...

Thanks for the SIMD tip ... I am actually looking forward making this available to our environment to try out the profiling tools.

thanks
Michael