Suppose I have dual core machine and I am using MKL in my application. I have not set MKL_NUM_THREADS, so my MKL routines will try to use both cores. Suppose though that another application is hammering both my cores; will MKL release that both cores are fully utilised and will back off and use only 1?
This is not stated anywhere in the documentation (unless I missed it), so some clarification would be helpful please.
No, I don't expect MKL to perform any checks on which cores are busy. When you don't set KMP_AFFINITY, you leave scheduling to the OS. As you hinted, you can cut back to 1 thread by setting MKL_NUM_THREADS or OMP_NUM_THREADS.
