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

[Lukasz Zalewski]

On 24/07/14 13:48, Balaji, Pavan wrote:
>
> 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 Intelcompilers 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.  Soany 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

Hi Pavan,
Thanks for the info. Yes, we want our users to use either intel or gcc 
to build their applications and link to the gcc built mpich.
We already have appropriate env variables (such as CC, FC, etc) set in 
the compiler module files which should be picked up by mpicc

Regards

L