New release: Intel® SDK for OpenCL* Applications XE 2013 R3

[Arik_N_Intel]

Happy New Year!

Intel has announced that Release 3 (R3) of the Intel® SDK for OpenCL* Applications 2013 XE now adds GOLD support for Microsoft Windows* Operating Systems on Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors.  The SDK continues to support Red Hat Linux* and SUSE Linux*. Available as a free download, the XE version provides a comprehensive application development environment that supports the full OpenCL 1.2 standard on platforms with Intel® Xeon® processors and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. The XE version targets at developers of highly parallel applications including High Performance Compute (HPC), workstations, and data analytics. 

XE version page: http://software.intel.com/en-us/vcsource/tools/opencl-sdk-xe

Please note that installation of MPSS ver 3.1.1 is needed (when using Xeon Phi):  http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-manycore-platform-software-stack-mpss-archive#31n-1

The main improvements in this release are:

• Gold support for OpenCL 1.2 using Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor on Windows* OS.
• Performance improvements:
  • High performance implementation of clEnqueueFillBuffer() is included in this release
  • Execution overhead has been improved. Tiny workgroups now execute significantly faster.
  • Better vectorization of 8-bit and 16-bit data types (BYTE, WORD)
  • Improved the performance of out-of-order queues
• Fixed kernel compilation crashes under debug and profiling modes
• Two new Xeon Phi performance related environment variables. Recommended settings below (details in the user guide):​
  • CL_CONFIG_MIC_DEVICE_NO_DMA_PREVIEW = 1​
  • CL_CONFIG_MIC_DEVICE_2MB_POOL_INIT_SIZE_MB = [Your total required buffers memory (peak)]

Regards,

     Arik Narkis