Parallel Composer 2011 from Intel

Intel Parallel Composer equips novice and advanced developers to create faster applications that exploit multicore and enable portability, reliability, scalability, and simplicity.

An invaluable addition to the Microsoft Visual Studio* C/C++ developer toolset, Intel Parallel Composer delivers support for new language extensions and offers extensive capabilities for simplified implementation of task and data parallelism. Though applications vary, in many instances a simple recompile results in a performance improvement of 10 percent or greater..

• Improved application performance with advanced compiler options and libraries

• Supports Intel® Parallel Building Blocks, a set of comprehensive parallel models, which provides choices for how to quickly implement robust parallelism

• Includes Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives (Intel® IPP), an extensive library of multicore-ready, highly optimized software functions for digital media and data-processing applications

• Saves time and takes advantage of multicore processors with automatic functions.

• Compatible with Microsoft Visual Studio*, preserving user skills, while safeguarding existing investments

• Supports the entire spectrum of parallelism from simple to complex, data to task, by offering application-class-specific, pre-threaded, and thread-safe libraries

Powerful C++ Compiler
Intel C++ Compiler can speed up your application. It is not unreasonable to expect a speedup of 10 percent or more with a simpler recompile. Your code is unique, so download an evaluation copy to see how it can help your code's performance.

It is compatible with Microsoft Visual* C++ and offers 32-bit and 64-bit development with a cross-compiler for 64-bit. The compiler also supports cross-compilation environments (32-bit host to develop 64-bit applications).

Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives (Intel® IPP)

Intel IPP offers thousands of optimized functions covering frequently used fundamental algorithms in:

Intel® Parallel Building Blocks
Intel® Parallel Building Blocks is a set of comprehensive parallel development models that support multiple approaches to parallelism. Since they share the same foundation, you can mix and match the models that suit your unique parallel implementation needs. These models easily integrate into existing applications to helps preserve investments in existing code and speeds development of parallel applications.

• Intel® Threading Building Blocks (Intel® TBB) 3.0 is a C++ template library solution that can be used to enable general parallelism. It is for C++ developers who write general-purpose loop and task parallelism applications. It includes scalable memory allocation, load-balancing, work-stealing task scheduling, a thread-safe pipeline and concurrent containers, high-level parallel algorithms, and numerous synchronization primitives.




• Intel® Cilk™ Plus is an Intel® C/C++ Compiler-specific implementation of parallelism: Intel® Cilk Plus is for C++ software developers who write simple loop and task parallel applications. It offers superior functionality by combining vectorization features with high-level loop-type data parallelism and tasking.




• Intel® Array Building Blocks (Intel® ArBB) (currently in beta) provides a generalized data parallel programming solution that frees application developers from dependencies on particular low-level parallelism mechanisms or hardware architectures. It is for software developers who write compute-intensive, data parallel algorithms. It produces scalable, portable, and deterministic parallel implementations from a single high-level, maintainable, and application-oriented specification of the desired computation.

What's New Overview

• Intel® Parallel Composer 2011:
  • Enhanced performance - C/C++ compiler 12.1 is now up to 47% faster than the nearest competitor through memory, auto-parallelization, and vectorization optimizations
  • Standards - Intel® Parallel Composer C++ Compiler 12.1 IA support of IEEE 754-2008 standard for Binary and Decimal floating point
  • C++0x standards - support for Variadic templates enables variable number of arguments
  • Lambda support


• Intel® Threading Building Blocks 4.0:
  • Flow Graph - flexible API for expressing static and dynamic dependencies between computations
  • Concurrent Unordered Set - thread-safe container to store and access user objects
  • Memory Pools - flexibility and performance by getting thread-safe and scalable object allocation
  • Generic GCC* Atomics Support - library portability enables Intel® TBB-based solutions on a broader range of platforms
  • Arbitrary nesting - improved interoperability with Intel® PBB enables composability advantages for Intel® Cilk™ Plus users


• Intel® Cilk™ Plus:
  • Enhanced SIMD pragma support – improved scalability and performance with SIMD pragma loops, vector length, and elemental functions support
  • SIMD pragma clause - "vectorlengthfor" provides more architectural and scalable way to define vector lengths of loops
  • Holder Hyperobjects - saves time and improves performance by enabling per-thread temporary storage
  • Intel® Cilk™ Plus v1.1 implemented with commercial support, simplifies going parallel
  • Mac* OS support

Once you install Intel Parallel Studio, there are Getting Started Guides that take just a few minutes. There is even sample code to get you started.

Here's why you'll want to use the Intel C++ Compiler - compatibility with Visual C++* and better performance!

How do I tell Microsoft Visual Studio* to use the Intel C++ Compiler?

The Intel Parallel Composer Parallel Debugger Extension enhances the debugger in Microsoft Visual Studio*. This tutorial shows how to utilize it.

Why use Intel Parallel Studio? It makes it easier to add parallelism and here's an example of the scaling benefit in this short video.

Learn how to enable your Microsoft Visual Studio* projects to use Intel® Threading Building Blocks.