| Intel® Software Development Products for Intel® Platforms and Technologies | |
| Intel® Fortran Compiler 10.1, Professional and Standard Editions for Linux* | |
![]() |
|||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||
|
|
The Intel® Fortran Compiler for Linux delivers rapid development and winning performance for the full range of Intel® processor-based platforms. It is a full-language Fortran 95 compiler with many features from the Fortran 2003 standard, plus a wide range of popular extensions. Automatically optimize and parallelize software to take best advantage of multi-core Intel® processors, including dual-core mobile, desktop, and enterprise platforms. |
| Performance |
|
Intel® Fortran Compiler Professional Edition lets you choose the tools that get most out of multi-core processors by combining the Fortran compiler and its built-in optimization, threading, and security capabilities with a highly optimized math library that simplifies the introduction of robust, scalable, multi-threaded math functions.
|
| Advanced Optimization Features |
| Software compiled using the Intel Fortran Compiler for Linux benefits from advanced optimization features, a few of which are explained briefly here, with links to more complete descriptions: |
| Multi-Threaded Application Support, including OpenMP* and auto-parallelization for simple and efficient software threading. | |
| Auto-vectorization parallelizes code to utilize the Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) instruction set architectures (SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, and SSE4) of our latest processors. | |
| High-Performance Parallel Optimizer (HPO) restructures and optimizes loops to ensure that auto-vectorization, OpenMP, or auto-parallelization best utilizes the processor’s capabilities for cache and memory accesses, SIMD instruction sets, and for multiple cores. This revolutionary capability, new in Version 10, combines vectorization, parallelization and loop transformations into a single pass which is faster, more effective and more reliable than prior discrete phases. | |
| Interprocedural Optimization (IPO) dramatically improves performance of small- or medium-sized functions that are used frequently, especially programs that contain calls within loops. The analysis capabilities of this optimizer can also give feedback on vulnerabilities and coding errors, such as uninitialized variables or OpenMP API issues, which cannot be detected as well by compilers which rely strictly on analysis by a compiler front-end. | |
| Profile-guided Optimization (PGO) improves application performance by reducing instruction-cache thrashing, reorganizing code layout, shrinking code size, and reducing branch mispredictions. | |
| Optimized Code Debugging with the Intel® Debugger improves the efficiency of the debugging process on code that has been optimized for Intel® architecture. |
|
| The Intel Fortran Compiler for Linux builds on a winning foundation. Position yourself to create next-generation software, for next-generation hardware. The following features are new since Version 9 of the compiler. |
| What's new | Benefit to you | ||||||||||||||
| Support for additional Linux distributions including Debian*, Ubuntu* and Fedora* 7 | Broaden target market by supporting additional Linux distributions. | ||||||||||||||
| More Fortran 2003 features, including Stream I/O | C Interoperability features make it easier to develop mixed-language applications. Asynchronous I/O enhances performance of applications which read and write large files. See the compiler Release Notes for a full list of supported Fortran 2003 features. | ||||||||||||||
|
Improved Performance and Threading
|
Better application performance for computationally intensive applications such as graphics/digital media, financial modeling, and high-performance computing for threaded and non-threaded applications. Our new High Performance Parallel Optimizer, HPO, offers an improved ability to analyze, optimize, and parallelize more loop nests. |
||||||||||||||
|
Security Checking and Diagnostics
|
Ability to create code that is less susceptible to security vulnerabilities, such as buffer overflow. The diagnostics are very helpful for novice and expert users for catching common coding errors, from unitialized variables to mismatched dummy and actual arguments to OpenMP API coding issues. | ||||||||||||||
| Optimization Reports | More detailed optimization diagnostics for users who want to use our advanced optimizations to help the compiler do a better job of tuning their applications. The new VTune™ Analyzer 9.0 can filter optimization reports to help guide optimization efforts. | ||||||||||||||
| Code generation and optimization support for future Intel processors implementing the SSE4 instructions | Take advantage of Streaming SIMD Extensions 4 (SSE4) for delivering expanded capabilities, enhanced performance, and greater energy efficiency for many applications. | ||||||||||||||
| Options to enable more advanced optimizations for loop unrolling and streaming stores | Improved application performance. | ||||||||||||||
|
Support for the Latest Multi-Core Processors
|
Intel® compilers future-proof your investment with assurance of world-class support for each successive generation of processors. That's a key advantage in a world where new hardware platforms come to market with awesome speed. Support for auto-parallelization and OpenMP enable you to create optimized, multithreaded applications that take full advantage of multi-core processing features to deliver outstanding performance. |
||||||||||||||
| Professional Edition | Includes not only the advanced capabilities of the compiler, but also the Intel® Math Kernel Library (Intel® MKL) with highly optimized functions for math processing. |
|
| This section gives detailed descriptions of the compiler’s advanced optimization features. |
| Multi-Threaded Application Support |
| OpenMP and auto-parallelization help convert serial applications into parallel applications, allowing you to take full advantage of multi-core technology like the Intel® Core™ Duo processor and Dual-Core Intel® Itanium® 2 processor, as well as symmetric multi-processing systems: |
| OpenMP* is the industry standard for portable multithreaded application development. It is effective at fine-grain (loop-level) and large-grain (function-level) threading. OpenMP directives are an easy and powerful way to convert serial applications into parallel applications, enabling potentially big performance gains from parallel execution on multi-core and symmetric multiprocessor systems. |
||
| Auto Parallelization improves application performance on multiprocessor systems by means of automatic threading of loops. This option detects parallel loops capable of being executed safely in parallel and automatically generates multithreaded code. Automatic parallelization relieves the user from having to deal with the low-level details of iteration partitioning, data sharing, thread scheduling, and synchronizations. It also provides the performance benefits available from multiprocessor systems and systems that support Hyper-Threading Technology (HT Technology). |
||
| For more information on multi-threaded application support, visit Intel's Threading Developer Center. | ||
| High Performance, Parallel Optimizer (HPO) |
|
| Automatic Vectorizer |
|
Vectorization automatically parallelizes code to maximize underlying processor capabilities. This advanced optimization analyzes loops and determines when it is safe and effective to execute several iterations of the loop in parallel by utilizing MMX™, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, and SSE4 instructions. Figure 1 is a graphical representation of a vectorized loop that shows four iterations computed with one SSE2 operation. |
![]() Figure 1. The Vectorizer in action |
|
|
Use vectorization to optimize your application code and take advantage of these new extensions when running on Intel® processors. Features include support for advanced, dynamic data alignment strategies, including loop peeling to generate aligned loads and loop unrolling to match the prefetch of a full cache line. |
||
| Interprocedural Optimization (IPO) |
Interprocedural optimization (IPO) can dramatically improve application performance in programs that contain many small- or medium-sized functions that are frequently used, especially for programs that contain calls within loops. This set of techniques, which can be enabled for automatic operation in the Intel® compilers, uses multiple files or whole programs to detect and perform optimizations, rather than focusing within individual functions.![]() |
|
| Figure 2. The interprocedural optimization process | |
|
| Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO) |
| The Profile-guided optimization (PGO) compilation process enables the Intel Fortran compiler to take better advantage of the processor microarchitecture, more effectively use instruction paging and cache memory, and make better branch predictions. It improves application performance by reorganizing code layout to reduce instruction-cache thrashing, shrinking code size, and reducing branch mispredictions. PGO is a three-stage process, as shown in Figure 3. Those steps include 1) a compile of the application with instrumentation added, 2) a profile-generation phase, where the application is executed and monitored, and 3) a recompile where the data collected during the first run aids optimization. A description of several code size influencing profile-guided optimizations follows:
|
||||||
![]() |
||||||
| Figure 3. Profile-guided optimization |
| Optimized Code Debugging with the Intel® Debugger |
| The Intel® Debugger enables optimized code debugging (i.e., debugging code that has been significantly transformed for optimal execution on a specific hardware architecture). The Intel compilers produce standards-compliant debug information for optimized code debugging that is available to all debuggers that support Intel compilers. The Intel Debugger supports multi-core architectures by enabling debugging of multithreaded applications, providing the following related capabilities: |
| An all-stop/all-go execution model (i.e., all threads are stopped when one is stopped, and all threads are resumed when one is resumed). | |
| List all created threads. | |
| Switch focus between threads. | |
| Examine detailed thread state. | |
| Set breakpoints (including all stop, trace, and watch variations) and display a back-trace of the stack for all threads or for a subset of threads. | |
| The built-in GUI provides a Thread panel (on the Current Source pane) that activates when a thread is created, and that allows an operator to select thread focus and display related details. | |
| The recently enhanced GNU Project Debugger (GDB debugger) can also be used for parallel applications. For additional information, please refer to the Intel Debugger Technical White Paper (PDF 210KB). | |
|
| Standards Compliance and Broad Compatibility |
|
| Quadruple precision REAL data type REAL(16) | |
| STRUCTURE, RECORD, UNION, MAP syntax for user-defined types | |
| Directives and functions to enhance mixed-language application development | |
| Binary stream I/O | |
For a complete list of language features, see the product documentation. The Intel Fortran Compiler for Linux also enhances programmer productivity with features such as: |
|
| Run-time array and string bounds checking | |
| Cross-file procedure interface checking | |
| Run-time uninitialized variable detection | |
| Error traceback with file name and line number | |
| Winning Performance across Application Domains |
| The Intel Fortran Compiler for Linux delivers exceptional performance, usability, and business advantages to a wide variety of software markets. |
![]() |
Next-generation data-intensive application developers benefit from dramatic performance optimizations using the Intel compilers to decrease latency and processing times, while also allowing software architects to add additional features without unacceptable impacts to performance. | |
![]() |
Scientific, research, and related applications benefit from fast compile times, high-performance execution, and solid technical support. Numerically intensive software can make excellent use of the parallelism in Intel processor-based platforms. | |
|
|
This section provides system requirements to develop applications for three different hardware platforms, which are described below. |
|
Processor Terminology IA-32 architecture - IA-32 architecture refers to systems based on 32-bit processors supporting at least the Pentium® II instruction set, (for example, Intel® Core™ processor or Intel® Xeon® processor), or processors from other manufacturers supporting the same instruction set, running a 32-bit operating system ("Linux x86"). Intel® 64 architecture - Intel® 64 architecture (formerly Intel® EM64T) refers to systems based on IA-32 architecture-based processors which have 64-bit architectural extensions, (for example, Intel® Core™2 processor or Intel® Xeon® processor), running a 64-bit operating system ("Linux x86_64"). If the system is running a 32-bit version of the Linux operating system, then IA-32 architecture applies instead. Systems based on the AMD Athlon64* and Opteron* processors running a 64-bit operating system are also supported by Intel compilers for Intel® 64 architecture-based applications. IA-64 architecture - Refers to systems based on the Intel® Itanium® 2 processor running a 64-bit operating system. Native and Cross-Platform Development The following list describes the supported combinations of compilation host (system on which you build the application) and application target (system on which the application runs).
Note: Development for a target different from the host may require optional library components to be installed from your Linux Distribution. Note: Cluster OpenMP* for Intel® Compilers for Linux* is a separately licensed feature and has different system requirements from that of the compilers. Please refer to the product website for further details. |
| Requirements to develop applications for processors that support Intel® 64 architecture or for AMD* Opteron* Processors | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Component | Minimum | Recommended | |||||||||||||||||||
| Processor |
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||
| RAM |
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||
| Disk Space |
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||
| Operating Systems |
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||
| Other Software |
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||
| Requirements to develop IA-64 architecture-based applications | |||||||||||||||
| Component | Minimum | Recommended | |||||||||||||
| Processor |
|
|
|||||||||||||
| RAM |
|
|
|||||||||||||
| Disk Space |
|
|
|||||||||||||
| Operating Systems |
|
|
|||||||||||||
| Other Software |
|
|
|||||||||||||
Note on gcc Versions The Intel compilers are tested with a number of different Linux distributions, with different versions of gcc. Some Linux distributions may contain header files different from those we have tested, which may cause problems. The version of glibc you use must be consistent with the version of gcc in use. Notes: |
||||||||||||||||
|
Additional System Requirements for Eclipse* |
||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
|
On systems where these browsers are not installed by default or available otherwise, such as on a SGI Propack 4 system, an alternate browser, e.g. Konqueror, can be used in the Eclipse Integrated Development environment. Within Eclipse, set it as the browser to be used by selecting Windows->Preferences->General->Web Browser and entering it as the external Web Browser. Note that such a browser cannot be designated as the internal Web Browser within Eclipse, and thus there will be no support available for internal web browsing with this configuration. |
| Intel provides both the tools and support to enhance the performance, functionality, and efficiency of software applications. |
| Compatible with leading Windows* and Linux* development environments, Intel® Software Development Products are the fastest and easiest way to take advantage of the latest features of Intel processors. Intel Software Development Products are designed for use in the full development cycle, and include Intel® Performance Libraries, Intel® Compilers (C++, Fortran for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS* X), Intel® VTune™ Analyzer, Intel® Threading Tools and Intel® Cluster Tools. |
| The Intel® Premier Support Web site provides expert technical support for all Intel software products, product updates and related downloads. For additional product information visit: www.intel.com/software/products. |
| Intel, the Intel logo, and VTune are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. |
| *Other brands and names may be claimed as the property of others. |
| Copyright © 2007, Intel Corporation |