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Re: [MANTA] Compiling on the SGI Prism - gcc or icc ?


Chronological Thread 
  • From: Abe Stephens <abe@sci.utah.edu>
  • To: Shreekanth Pavar <shreekanth.pavar@ucl.ac.uk>
  • Cc: manta@sci.utah.edu, Steven Manos <s.manos@ucl.ac.uk>
  • Subject: Re: [MANTA] Compiling on the SGI Prism - gcc or icc ?
  • Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2007 09:07:01 -0700
In our experience gcc was unable to produce efficient ia64 code, which like the Itanium2 architecture is vastly different than x86. At one point we measured a 55% performance gap between GCC and the Intel compiler on the platform. Unfortunately it appears that certain versions of the ia64 Intel compiler segfault when compiling the SSE code in Manta. This is obviously a compiler bug and I don't know if it is fixed in the newest versions.

You're certainly welcome to try both and see if newer versions of either compiler perform better. While it's more likely that you'll be able to enable SSE using gcc, it's not clear if that compiler has been improved significantly.

Abe

Shreekanth Pavar wrote:
Hi

As Manta incorporates SSE optimisations I was wondering if there was any
advantages to using the Intel compiler when compiling on an SGI Prism, as it is
an itanium architecture.

I am aware that gcc also has SSE compiler option flags available for versions
4.0 and above but we are runnning gcc version 3.3.3 (SuSE Linux) on our Prism,
so perhaps an alternative would be to get this updated instead ?

We are thinking of doing both but would welcome your opinion on which you think
would be fastest and why.

Regards

Shree






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