MPSS 3.4 released last week

[BelindaLiviero]

Wanted to bring your attention to the fact that MPSS 3.4 was released last week

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-manycore-platform-software-stack-mpss

A blog that describes its key features can be found here: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/prominent-features-of-the-intel-manycore-platform-software-stack-intel-mpss-version-34

Included in this release is a preview functionality called "heterogeneous streams":

Heterogeneous Streams

• When it comes to managing concurrency, simpler is often better.  A FIFO stream is about as simple as it can get!  Intel’s newest concurrency offering is called hStreams - a library interface for concurrent streams in a heterogeneous context.  The Preview Release of hStreams is installed as part this Intel® MPSS release.  hStreams primitives enable users to enqueue computation and communication in streams, enabling concurrency among the host and one or more coprocessors, among tasks within a coprocessor, and between communication and computation.  hStreams code is portable to future implementations with heterogeneous clusters.  hStreams makes it easy to manage remote memory allocation and transfers between the host and coprocessor.  It allows for explicit synchronization between the host and card and among streams when necessary.  Users can write and compile their own code for remote execution on an Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor, or use stock gemm, memcpy and memset building blocks.  The user-provided code can be threaded and vectorized to make full use of a portion of the machine resources, e.g. using OpenMP 4.x.  The C API allows flexible inclusion in source codes written in many languages. 
  
  hStreams is designed to cover functionality that is similar to third-party streaming APIs, such that it can readily be enabled. For details on how to make to link with this library see hStreams_Usage.pdf. The hStreams_Overview.pdf and hStreams_Reference.pdf also provide additional references in /usr/share/doc/hStreams (Linux*) or C:\Program Files\Intel\MPSS\docs\hstreams (Microsoft® Windows)

Other information of importance about MPSS 3.4:

1. What tools did Intel validate with this release?

The following Parallel Studio XE 2015 and Intel® C/C++ Composer XE 2013 SP1 Update 4 tools were tested:

- Intel® Compiler 14.0.4 and 15.0

- Intel® MKL 11.1 Update 3 and 11.2

- Intel® TBB 4.3

- GDB Versions: 2014.0  (7.5) and 2015.0  (7.7)

- Intel® Vtune™ Amplifier XE 2015

- Intel® MPI Library 5.0.2

- Intel® Trace Analyzer and Collector 9.0

All other tools included in these suites must be compatible with MPSS 3.4. If you have any issues, please let us know by opening an issue in the forum or Intel Premier support.

There are changes being discussed inside of Intel on the frequency of MPSS releases and support lifetime for each of the releases.   We anticipate  coming back and communicating those changes very soon (hopefully within the next 2-3 weeks)