Pre-use questions about MKL on Linux

[schramge]

Hi everyone,

We have a Linux cluster with both single and dual core
Intel Xeon CPUs. I would like to install Intel MKL v10
since it gives (amongst others) optimed BLAS for the
Xeon processor family.
My first goal is to use MKL to get a better performance of
Octave (www.octave.org) which can benifit greatly from the
use of optimised BLAS and LAPACK. A second goal is to use
MKL for parallel computing on the cluster.

I have a number of questions regarding MKL:
1. we use Slackware Linux v. 11.0.0 (kernel 2.6.18.3-32-smp), which
is not listed amongst the supported Linux distributions. Can I
still install MKL?
2. is a single version of MKL available for both the single and dual
core Xeon processors, or do I need to purchase two different versions
of MKL?
3. obviously, it may be convenient to use an evaluation version first.
Is this version fully functional? And what is the evaluation period?

I hope that someone can answer these questions.

Very best wishes,

George

[TimP]

1. The fact that Slackware is not listed as a supported distro simply means it hasn't been tested, no reason it shouldn't work.
2. MKL comes with both the threaded and sequential libraries, in case you want to use OpenMP threading for one processor and no threading for the other. The threaded library works fine with one thread.
There is a special cluster MKL which includes scalapack. It includes all the components of the standard MKL. If you don't depend on MKL for MPI facilities, you can use standard MKL on a cluster.
3. Evaluation should give you 30 days support. It is a standard version, perhaps not the most recent.

[Todd_R_Intel]

A few corrections:

1. Tim is right with respect to your first question. We can't test all Linux distributions, but find that MKL works on most of them.

2. There are three versions of MKL for each of the three supported operating systems: Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. Each of these has libraries that support all the different processors we support. Tim mentions a Cluster edition, but with version 10.0 the cluster software is included in the standardLinux and Windowsproducts.

3. The evaluation version can be used for 30 days. It's the latest version of MKL and is fully functional.

Regards,
Todd