[mpich-discuss] Benefits of using intel compiler over gcc when building mpich

[Balaji, Pavan]

There’s no real benefit in building MPICH itself with the Intel compiler over GCC (there is a little benefit in some cases, but not significant, and not in commonly used code paths).

However, presumably you want your application code to be built with the Intel compiler.  If you do so, you’ll be linking an application built with the Intel compiler with a library (MPICH) built with GCC.

This “should work” as per the Intel folks since the Intel compilers are compatible with the GNU compilers, but we have not tested this mode (I don’t think Intel has either, but I could be wrong).  Note that, when you build MPICH with GCC, mpicc will internally call gcc.  So any application that builds with mpicc will be using gcc.  If you instead want to use icc for the applications, you’ll need to either modify mpicc or create a wrapper (mpicc-foobar) that internally calls mpicc -cc=icc $@.

Hope that helps.

  — Pavan

On Jul 23, 2014, at 2:38 PM, Lukasz Zalewski <l.zalewski at qmul.ac.uk> wrote:

> Hi all,
> Are there any benefits of building mpich with intel compiler over gcc?
> 
> https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/article/476380/intel-linux-compiler-14-0-gnu-compatibility-rev4.pdf states that it is compatible with gcc (4.1 or later).
> 
> We would like to reduce number of different builds for the same mpich version.
> 
> Regards
> 
> L
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--
Pavan Balaji  ✉️
http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~balaji