why not Parallel Advisor XE for Fortran?

[Michal_Kvasnicka]

One of most demanding and most expecting tool was not included to the Intel Parallel Studio XE 2011 suite. Why? What product roadmap for the Parallel Studio XE (Fortran branch) we can expect in the near future?

For everyone who needs to parallelize any legacy fortran code is something like "Advisor" blessing from heaven, because authors are often no able to help. Recently is available only a few tools:

- ParaWise (http://www.parallelsp.com/index.htm)

- PIPS (http://www.pips4u.org/)

- VAST-F/toOpenMP (http://www.crescentbaysoftware.com/vast_toOpenMP.html)

- ...?

which are able to parallelize the fortran on source code level via automatic and/or semi-automatic way. But these tools are mostly very expensive, hard to use or learn and its functionality is limited only on older fortran standards and parallel technologies.

So, what are the near future INTEL plans on this topic?

Michal

[Ron_Green]

Michal,

I will take your question/suggestion back to management. We don't speak to future plans in public forums.

Advisor is part of the Parallel Studio suite, which is intended for those new to parallelism and development. So it makes sense to get the tool working there first. Remember, it is new technology and is not mature at this point in time. Another consideration: Fortran programmers tend to work with more mature codes, which often are already optimized/parallelized and maintained by more experienced programmers, often very familiar with parallelization techniques (manual). The target audience for Advisor are those customers less experienced in programming.

So I can't say when or if you will see Advisor XE for Fortran, but certainly we have considered and will continue to look at this for the future.

ron

[Michal_Kvasnicka]

Ron,

I just want to add one important remark.

As I said in my previous email. Fortran users needs to parallelize huge amount of legacy fortran codes.

For example, I am working at nuclear energy industry (reactor physics, optimization) and I can seriously confirm, that vast majority of codes are still "old" and serial only fortran77 and fortran90 codes (typicaly from 1980s and 1990s). These codes, or at least its most CPU intensive parts, should be reprogrammed for modern multicore (SMP) and multinode (cluster) computers on source code level without detailed knowledge of the algorithm implementation (lack of detailed documentation, etc.) . And this is the reason why is "Fortran Advisor XE" so demanded.

Michal

[Steven_L_Intel1]

Michal,

Take a look at the new "Guided Auto Parallelism" feature. This is an alternate approach to Parallel Advisor and may be of use to you. The Parallel Advisor team is aware of the interest from Fortran users, but the first release was targeted for C++, just as the initial releases of Parallel Amplifier and Parallel Inspector were.