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Intel® Parallel Studio 2011 SP1 Release Notes

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

This page provides the current Installation Guide and Release Notes for the Intel® Parallel Studio 2011 SP1 product. All files are in PDF format - Adobe Reader* (or compatible) required.

To get product updates, log in to the Intel® Software Development Products Registration Center

For questions or technical support, visit Intel® Software Developer Support

Version 2011 SP1 Initial release, September 6, 2011: release_notes_studio.pdf

Comparing the command-line interface of Intel(R) Parallel Inspector 2011 and Intel(R) Inspector XE 2011

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 10:00:00 -0800

Command-line Interface (CLI) is intended to help a user in accelerating routine work and avoiding the user’s interaction with the GUI while collecting the correctness data. Both products, Parallel Inspector and Inspector XE, provide CLI functionality, but in a vastly different volume. Parallel Inspector is designed for using as a part of Microsoft(R) Visual Studio IDE and provides an excellent user interface for starting the correctness analysis and analyzing collected data. The Parallel Inspector contains some basic CLI functionality which allows collecting results during off-hours, so you can view those results at your convenience. In addition, it can be used for regression testing to determine if source code changes introduced new memory and threading problems. The Inspector XE, however, provides additional value of supporting managed runtimes, selecting collection modes and managing the detailed results output.

Let’s review the basic commands provided by Parallel Inspector and then observe the additional functionality available with the Inspector XE. It’s expected that a user is familiar with the basic functionality of Parallel Inspector and the correctness analysis concepts.

The Parallel Inspector CLI collection commands set includes:

-collect action
Runs a memory or threading error analysis, e.g. mi1 level (Does my target leak memory?) or ti1 level (Does my target have deadlocks?)

-command action
Performs an action on a running analysis, e.g. stop, which stops target execution and collection.

-create-suppression-file action
Generates a suppression file for all detected problems in a result.

-finalize action
Redoes symbol resolution for an existing result.

Once the data is collected, Inspector reports a summary of detected problems in the insp-cl.txt file in the result directory. Alternatively, a user may check the insp-cl exit code for new errors.

There are quite a few useful command modifiers that help to perform data collection and results analysis.

Here are some basic modifiers:

-result-dir
The common modifier used to identify a location for storing Inspector data.

-quiet/-verbose
The common modifier used to minimize/maximize information written to log files.

-search-dir
The collect and finalize action modifier used to configure the insp-cl command to search non-standard directories during target execution, analysis, and finalization.

-suppression-file
The collect action modifier used to apply one or more suppression files that contain rules for matching problems that should be ignored and therefore not included in the summary of detected problems.

(-no)-discard-suppressed-problems
The collect action modifier used to (not) delete from a result all detected problems that match the rules in applied suppression files.

-return-app-exitcode
The collect action modifier used to override Inspector exit codes with the target application exit code.

Note: Run insp-cl -help to access built-in documentation that provides more details.

Here is the example of the Parallel Inspector’s output after memory errors analysis started with the following command line:

 >insp-cl.exe -collect mi2 -result-dir r000mi -verbose -- MemoryTest.exe 
 >r000mi/insp-cl.txt 
 === Start: [2010/12/08 15:29:19] ===  
Used suppression file(s): [] 
 
11 new problem(s) found  
 1 Mismatched allocation/deallocation problem(s) detected  
 5 Memory leak problem(s) detected  
 3 Invalid memory access problem(s) detected  
 1 Invalid partial memory access problem(s) detected  
 1 Uninitialized partial memory access problem(s) detected  
=== End: [2010/12/08 15:29:26] ===

The Inspector XE supports all the environments and programming languages supported by the Parallel Inspector. In addition it supports .NET/C# on Windows, and C/C++, and Fortran languages on Windows and Linux. Inspector XE’s CLI provides a much richer set of commands and modifiers that help to:

Collect results as part of an automated or background task, so you can view those results at your convenience;

Perform regression testing to determine if source code changes introduced new memory and threading problems;

Generate predefined reports in several formats.

Here are the additional collection commands:

-import action
Creates a new result from an existing Intel® Thread Checker result or raw data file, or from an existing Parallel Inspector result or raw data file.

-report action
Generates a summary, list of problems, or list of code locations report.

Now let’s review the actions and their modifiers that enrich the collection and reporting experience.

Collection action modifiers:

-mrte-mode
Speeds up collection by excluding native or managed code, or inspect all code.

-exclude-modules
Speeds up collection by excluding application (or child application) modules from inspection.

-executable-of-interest
Processes tree analysis. Inspects an application that is not the starting application. E.g. inspects an application called by a script.

-custom-analysis-type
If the combination of analysis type settings in the preset analysis types do not meet user’s needs, a new custom analysis can be created.

(-no-)-auto-finalize
Performs (no) symbol resolution and suppressions after data collection.

-suppressions
Speeds up collection by not collecting data that matches project private suppression rules - delete. Collects and strikes through result data that matches project private suppression rules - mark. Ignores all project private suppression rules - none.

-knob
Sets knob value for selected analysis type in order to fine-tune analysis type settings. This modifier has to be reviewed separately.

Useful fine-tuning analysis type settings:

stack-depth knob
Sets the depth of functions’ call stacks to be collected. Could be selected among 1 | 8 | 16 | 24 | 32 for any type of analysis. For the threading error analyses: the higher the number, the higher the cost.

analyze-stack knob
If set true, detects the invalid and uninitialized accesses to memory allocated on stack for mi3 level. If not set or set false, significantly decreases the overhead of analysis.

resources knob
If set true, detects the system resource leaks on the memory analysis levels mi1 and mi2. If set false, may decrease the list of reported errors.

terminate-on-deadlock knob
If set true, the target application is stopped when a deadlock is detected and the threading error analysis is automatically completed.

scope knob
If set l2, extremely thorough memory access check with byte granularity to 1 byte, detects data races on stack accesses, and does not defer memory check. Extremely high overhead.

Report action modifiers allow generating flexible reports by formatting, sorting and redirecting the results of analysis:

-report-output
Generates report output to file system location instead of default stdout.

-csv-delimiter
Selects a delimiter for csv-formatted report output: comma | tab | string

-filter-include
Identifies data to show in the report, with predefined form: attribute=value, where the attributes are the same as for -sort-asc(desc)

Note: Run inspxe-cl -help to access built-in documentation that provides more details.

Here is the example of the Inspector XE output after memory errors analysis and report request ran with the following command lines:

 >inspxe-cl.exe -collect mi2 -result-dir r001mi -exclude-modules=MSVCR90D.dll -knob stack-depth=8  -- MemoryTest.exe 
 >r001mi/inspxe-cl.txt 
=== Start: [2010/12/09 12:32:28] ===  
Used suppression file(s): [] 
 
9 new problem(s) found  
 1 Invalid memory access problem(s) detected  
 1 Invalid partial memory access problem(s) detected  
 5 Memory leak problem(s) detected  
 1 Mismatched allocation/deallocation problem(s) detected  
 1 Uninitialized partial memory access problem(s) detected  
=== End: [2010/12/09 12:32:36] ===

 >inspxe-cl.exe -report observations -result-dir r001mi -format=csv -sort-asc=source,line -csv-delimiter=tab -filter-include function=main -report-output=out.csv 
 >out.csv

Intel® Software Development Products Technical Presentations

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Spend a few minutes to jump start your product experience. Please join us for one of the following Intel® Software Development Products technical presentations. These one hour presentations give you a chance to view a short live presentation or demo and then ask questions to our support engineers either about the presentation/demo or about anything related to using the product presented.

Want to learn about upcoming technical presentations or when recordings are posted? You can subscribe via an RSS feed or via email.

Upcoming Technical Presentations

Future-Proof Your Application's Performance With Vectorization

You’ve heard of using parallelism to run your application across multiple cores. Vectorization is another level of parallelism that occurs within 1 CPU core – it enables one instruction to operate on multiple pieces of data at the same time. Vectorization is an important contributor to performance on current x86 processors, including the 2nd Generation Intel® Core™ Processor Family, and is vital for performance on future processors such as the Intel® Many Integrated Core (Intel® MIC) architecture. Understanding how to vectorize your applications now will allow much easier migration to future processor architectures. Scientific, engineering, and multimedia applications are all potential candidates for this technology.

This presentation is for C, C++, and Fortran developers, and will help you get started understanding and evaluating vectorization using new technologies such as Intel® Cilk Plus, pragma SIMD and the Intel Compiler’s Guided Auto Parallelization report. We will also discuss the pros and cons of various techniques and usages.

As a special benefit for live attendees, you will also have the opportunity to request a follow-up with an Intel vectorization expert! Don’t miss this opportunity to position your application for the future!

First session recording and Q&A available.

Past Technical Presentations

Analysis of hybrid applications with the Intel Cluster Studio XE 2012

With the launch of Intel® Cluster Studio XE 2012, Intel enhanced the premium software development tools package for clusters with the inclusion of MPI support in Intel® Parallel Studio XE, and added new features for better scalability and improved performance. This session will introduce you to all MPI components of the new Intel® Cluster Studio XE 2012. You’ll learn how to use the new and more scalable startup mechanism to run MPI applications well up to 90000 cores, you’ll take a dive into benchmark data, and the improvements and details of the mpitune tool, and you’ll see, in an interactive demo, key elements and new scalability features of Intel® Trace Analyzer and Collector. Finally, you’ll be shown how to enable the new MPI support in the Intel® VTune™ Amplifier XE and Intel® Inspector XE tools.

Recording available (Windows viewable only)
Presented: Wednesday, December 7, 2011 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PST
Presentation slides (PDF format)

Using Intel(R) VTune(TM) Amplifier XE to Tune Software on Intel(R) Microarchitecture Codename Sandy Bridge, Part 2: Common Issues & Tuning Suggestions

This webinar is the second part of our 2-part series on Using Intel(R) VTune(TM) Amplifier XE to Tune Software on Intel(R) Microarchitecture Codename Sandy Bridge. We recommend you watch part 1 first unless you are already familiar with the VTune Amplifier XE Sandy Bridge interface and the pipeline slots methodology. This technical presentation will discuss common performance issues, how to measure their impact on Sandy Bridge, and specific suggestions for resolving each.

Presented: Wednesday, November 9, 2011 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PST
Recording available (Windows viewable only)
Presentation slides (PDF format)

Using Intel(R) VTune(TM) Amplifier XE to Tune Software on Intel(R) Microarchitecture Codename Sandy Bridge, Part 1: Methodology & Interface.

Presented: Tuesday, November 8, 2011 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PST
Recording Available (Windows viewable only)
Presentation slides (PDF format)

This technical presentation is part of a 2-part series on Using Intel(R) VTune(TM) Amplifier XE to Tune Software on Intel(R) Microarchitecture Codename Sandy Bridge. Part 1 will discuss the VTune Amplifier XE and its new features specifically for performance analysis on Sandy Bridge. It will also detail our general performance tuning methodology, based on hotspots. The final section will cover the Sandy Bridge microarchitectural details you need to understand to get the most from our Sandy Bridge tuning guide and interface.

Using Intel(R) Inspector XE with Fortran Applications

This technical presentation will present an overview of the powerful correctness and security checking features of Intel® Inspector XE. There will be a focus on using Intel Inspector XE on Fortran applications. The presentation will include example problems detected by the memory, threading, and static security analysis tools as well as some possible solutions. For more details, please check the following blog post.

Presented: Wednesday, Aug 17, 2011, 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PDT
Recording Available (Windows viewable only)
Presentation slides (PDF format)

Modeling parallelism with Intel® Parallel Advisor

An application written in a sequential language like C++ can be understood in two ways. It can be understood as an exact specific of how a program must execute, or it can be understood as a specification of the kinds of computations that must be performed. In the Parallel Advisor, we exploit the second interpretation by introducing a modeling language that can be embedded into your sequential application. This modeling language allows you to precisely specify where and how the sequential execution of your application is over-constrained and what flexibility you are willing to utilize to harness parallel execution. This talk will describe the modeling language, show the benefits of parallel modeling over parallel execution, and illustrate the correspondence of the parallel modeling language to common idioms available in Intel® Threading Building Blocks and Intel® Cilk™ Plus.

Presented: Thursday, July 21, 2011, 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PDT
Recording Available (Windows viewable only)
Presentation slides (Powerpoint format)

Intel® Parallel Advisor 2011 Shows Its Stuff on Duplo

Intel® Parallel Advisor 2011 provides the information and the tools needed by any C/C++ programmer to add safe and effective parallelism to their programs. This is demonstrated by applying Advisor to Duplo, a serial, open-source application for finding duplicate blocks of code in a set of source files. Parallel Advisor is a component of Intel® Parallel Studio 2011 and is a free download for Intel® Parallel Studio XE. It is integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio*.

In this presentation, you will learn how to:
• Find the places in Duplo where parallelism can be usefully added
• Find and replace the parts of Duplo that prevent parallelism
• Test the revised version of Duplo for parallel correctness and performance
• While keeping Duplo serial through these steps!
• Implement the parallelism using Intel® Cilk™ Plus

Along the way we discover an unexpected opportunity to improve the serial performance by 30%. We also encounter two ordering dependencies that almost derail parallelization, until Cilk’s hyperobjects come to the rescue. Finally, we see how closely Advisor’s parallel performance estimates match the actual speed-ups of the parallel version of Duplo.

Presented: Thursday, July 21, 2011, 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PDT
Recording Available (Windows viewable only)
Presentation slides (Powerpoint format)

Choosing Where To Introduce Parallelism (using Intel® Parallel Advisor 2011)

The Intel® Parallel Advisor 2011 has a feature that surveys your running program and shows you cumulative time spent within functions and loops. Learn how to combine this information with your knowledge of the program to decide where to invest your time adding parallelism. The presenter Bevin Brett will describe how you should consider both program structure and data structure as you make this decision.

Presented: Wednesday, March 23, 2011, 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PDT
Recording Available (Windows viewable only)
Presentation slides (Powerpoint format)

Topic: Getting More out of your CPU – Using Intel® C++ Composer XE to Maximize Code Vectorization and Improve Application Performance

SIMD (Single Input – Multiple Data) Instructions have long been an important performance feature of Intel (and Intel-compatible) CPUs. Now, with the introduction of the Sandy Bridge processor family and its support for the new Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions (Intel® AVX) instructions, taking advantage of these instructions remains one of the best ways to optimize for performance. In this technical presentation, we will show how you can use the state of the art auto-vectorizer provided with Intel® C++ Composer XE to generate these instructions for you automatically from high level C++, and how you as the programmer can encourage Composer XE to generate efficient code even when using traditionally vectorization-unfriendly codes like arrays of structures or mixed datatypes.

Presented: March 15, 2011

Recording Available (Windows viewable only)

Presentation slides (Powerpoint format)

Kernel Template Library Code Examples

Topic: Intel® ArBB Code Tips II – A compilation of best practices and useful hints

Thanks to our user base and increasing community we extend the first Intel® Array Building Blocks (Intel® ArBB) "Code Tips" webinar. In this webinar, we discuss best practices including:

• How to develop in immediate mode and later "toggle" to production/JIT code
• How to get initial data into a container (memory mapping and binding)
• How to update the values of a containers according to an index

We share code examples, background information, and insight to our design decisions. This webinar is great for developers who want to have a fresh start after some initial steps, or people who are preparing to have a look at Intel ArBB. It is also a great chance to ask questions of Intel ArBB engineers and experts during and after this webinar.

Presented: February 22, 2011

Recording available

Presentation available

Topic: Intel® Parallel Building Blocks: Quickly Manipulate Data in Parallel Using Intel® Cilk™ Plus Array Notation/Elemental Functions

As multicore systems become prevalent on desktops, servers and laptop systems, new performance leaps will come as the industry adopts parallel programming techniques. However, many parallel environments consist of confusing, complex and error-prone rules and constructs. The Intel Cilk Plus language, built on the Cilk technology developed at M.I.T. over the past two decades, is designed to provide a simple, well-structured model that makes development, verification and analysis easy. Because Intel Cilk Plus is an extension to C and C++, programmers typically do not need to restructure programs significantly in order to add parallelism.

This technical presentation will focus on examples showing the benefits of using Cilk Plus array notation and elemental functions to define operations that can be run of multiple data elements simultaneously using the underlying Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions provided by Intel® CPUs.

Presented: February 1, 2011

Recording available

Presentation available

Topic: Intel® Parallel Building Blocks: Quickly Write Parallel Tasks Using Intel® Cilk™ Plus Keywords and Reducers

As multicore systems become prevalent on desktops, servers and laptop systems, new performance leaps will come as the industry adopts parallel programming techniques. However, many parallel environments consist of confusing, complex and error-prone rules and constructs. The Intel Cilk Plus language, built on the Cilk technology developed at M.I.T. over the past two decades, is designed to provide a simple, well-structured model that makes development, verification and analysis easy. Because Intel Cilk Plus is an extension to C and C++, programmers typically do not need to restructure programs significantly in order to add parallelism.

This technical presentation will focus on examples showing the benefits of using the Cilk Plus keywords cilk_spawn, cilk_for and cilk_sync along with Cilk Plus reducers such as reducer_opadd to define tasks that can be run on different cpu cores in parallel.

Presented: January 18, 2011

Recording Available

Q&A and Presentation Available

Topic: What's New with Intel® Fortran Composer XE 2011?

Aside from the obvious name change, Intel® Fortran Composer XE 2011 launched in early November brings many new features to Intel's Fortran implementation. In this technical presentation, Steve Lionel and Ron Green from Intel's Fortran Support team discuss the new Fortran features added in Intel Fortran, including our exciting new Coarray Fortran implementation. This webinar also gives Intel Fortran users a chance to ask questions about the product, the name change, and directions for Intel Fortran going forward.

Presented: December 14, 2010

Recording Available

Topic: Intel ArBB Code Tips

This webinar is an intermediate-level talk for users who have had some experience with Intel® Array Building Blocks. But new users may also benefit from it by getting a jump start on programming Intel® ArBB. During this one-hour presentation, we are sharing many code tips to cover the following topics:

1. How to express parallelism using container operations and the arbb::map() function
2. User defined types and functions
3. How to program for performance
4. Pitfalls and misuses to avoid

Presented: December 9, 2010

Recording and Presentation Slides Available

Topic: Accelerate your multimedia and data processing application with the Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives (Intel® IPP) 7.0

The Intel® IPP library is a collection of highly optimized software functions for use with a wide range of applications, including digital media, signal processing and data-processing applications and is included as a component within the Intel Parallel Studio developer's toolkit.

This webinar will cover key new features and changes that are part of the IPP 7.0 release, and provide a review of the drop-in high-level data compression libraries now included with the Intel IPP library: ipp_zlib, ipp_bzip2, ipp_gzip and ipp_lzopack. New features in the Intel® Intel® IPP 7.0 library, include:

• Data Compression Library support
• JPEG-XR support and imaging performance improvements
• Optimizations for the 256-bit AVX SIMD instruction set
• Intel® AES-NI (cryptography) optimizations

Presenter: Paul Fischer
Presented: November 18, 2010

Recording and Q&A Available

Topic: Super Charge Applications with Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives – A Component of Intel® Parallel Studio 2011

Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives (Intel® IPP) is an extensive library of multicore-ready, highly optimized software functions for digital media and data-processing applications and comes with Intel Parallel Studio 2011 and Intel® Parallel Composer 2011. We will show how to set up an application to use Intel IPP from within Intel Parallel Studio, what kind functions the library has to offer and an example of the performance benefits from using the library.

Presenter: Walter Shands
Presented: October 26, 2010

Recording and Q&A Available

Topic: Intel® Array Building Blocks Technical Presentation: Introduction and Q&A

Intel® Array Building Blocks provides a generalized data parallel programming solution that frees application developers from dependencies on particular hardware architectures. It offers an API that allows parallel algorithms to be expressed at a high level. Its dynamic compiler and runtime produce scalable, portable and deterministic parallel implementations from the single high-level source. This technical presentation is an introduction to Intel ArBB. We will discuss the main features of Intel ArBB, and walk through some sample code to demonstrate the benefits such as forward-scaling, safety-by-design, and ease-of-use. There will be a Q&A session at the end of the presentation to answer any questions you have for Intel ArBB.

Presenters: Noah Clemons
Presented: October 14, 2010

Recording available

Topic: Adding Parallelism with Intel® Parallel Advisor 2011: No Parallelism Experience Required

Intel® Parallel Advisor 2011 provides the information and the tools needed by any C/C++ programmer to add safe and effective parallelism to their programs. Parallel Advisor is a component of Intel® Parallel Studio 2011 and is integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio*.

In this presentation, you will learn how to:
• Find the places in the program where parallelism can be usefully added
• Find and replace the parts of the program that prevent parallelism
• Test the revised program for parallel correctness and performance
• Keep the program serial through these steps
• Add parallelism to code samples / examples

Presenter: Mark Davis
Presented: October 12, 2010

Recording available

Topic: Introduction to Intel® Cilk™ Plus

Intel® Cilk Plus, one of the Intel® Parallel Building Blocks which includes Intel® Threading Building Blocks and Intel® Array Building Blocks, provides C/C++ language extensions to implement parallelism in your application simply and efficiently. This technical talk will cover this new syntax, supported by the C++ compiler in Intel® Parallel Composer, and how it provides an easy way to use task and vector parallelism to take full advantage of multiple cores and the SIMD-compute engine on CPUs.

Presenter: Brandon Hewitt
Presented: September 28, 2010

Recording available

Topic: Introducing Intel® Parallel Building Blocks

This technical presentation will introduce three methods for adding parallelization to your serial application: Intel® Threading Building Blocks, Intel® Cilk™ Plus, and Intel® Array Building Blocks. The methods will be compared showing where each will be most beneficial and to what types of applications. In addition to the presentation there will be a brief demo followed by time for Q&A on these threading methods or any other questions you might have about using Intel® Parallel Studio.

Presenter: Noah Clemons
Presented: September 23, 2010

Recording available

Topic: Introducing Intel Parallel Inspector

Intel® Parallel Inspector is a serial and multithreading error checking analysis tool for Microsoft Visual Studio* C/C++ developers. Inspector detects challenging memory leaks and corruption errors as well as threading data races and deadlock errors. This comprehensive developer productivity tool pinpoints errors and provides guidance to help ensure application reliability and quality. This technical presentation will include an overview of the tool, live demo, and Q&A session. You are welcome to ask questions about any part of Intel® Parallel Studio during the Q&A session.

Presenter: Jackson Marusarz
Presented: August 19, 2010

Recording available

These webinars are part of a program from the Intel® Software Development Products technical consulting team to deliver technical presentations to customers.

Support for Intel® Cilk™ Plus in Intel® Parallel Inspector 2011

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 21:00:00 -0700

Intel® Cilk™ Plus is a simple and powerful abstraction for expressing parallelism. It is one of the Intel® Parallel Building Blocks and it is included in Intel® Parallel Composer 2011, which is part of Intel® Parallel Studio 2011. In this initial introduction of Intel® Cilk™ Plus it is important to understand how the analysis features of Intel® Parallel Studio 2011 display results when Intel® Cilk™ Plus is used in your software. This article details the level of support provided by Intel® Parallel Inspector 2011. Cilk Plus support should improve in future versions.

Overview
You can expect that Parallel Inspector 2011 will not crash while analyzing a project that includes Cilk Plus code. In general, either Memory or Threading analysis of a project with Cilk Plus code should generate a strict superset of the diagnostics that are generated without the Cilk keywords. This means that there may be some additional diagnostics reported for Cilk Plus code. Most of these will be “false positives” – where an issue is identified that is not really present (this would be due to interactions between the user code and Cilk Plus runtime library and incomplete instrumentation). Some of the additional diagnostics might be legitimate observations of behavior in the Cilk Plus runtime, but still not correctness issues (meaning, the Cilk Plus runtime has executed something by design that Parallel Inspector incorrectly categorized as a problem). There are a few exceptions to the superset assertion above, which are following in the appropriate sections.

Threading Analysis:
The results of Threading Analysis, at any level, on Cilk Plus code may result in false positives but should not result in false negatives. In other words, Parallel Inspector may report problems that are not really issues, but it should not fail to find legitimate problems. These “false positives” may be found in user code or in the Cilk Plus runtime. The figure below shows the results of running Threading Analysis for the simple count primes program with one cilk_for loop. These results show both real data races (P1, P2, and P4, which were introduced for the purpose of this example) and a false positive data race related to the Cilk Plus runtime (P3).

Threading Analysis Results for Count Primes program with data races

If you are using Threading Analysis with a project containing Cilk Plus code and find a diagnostic you determine is a false positive, you can use the suppression feature to ensure you don’t see it again. If it is found in the Cilk Plus runtime, you can either suppress it, or if you wish you can report it to the Parallel Inspector support team by using http://premier.intel.com.
There is one case where Threading Analysis may fail to find legitimate data races in your Cilk Plus code. Thread Checker will not find races between spawned children and parents except when the parent is actually stolen. In a Cilk Plus cilk_for or cilk_spawn, the runtime is given permission to run work on other threads. It uses heuristics to decide whether or not to do so. For example, if a loop containing a cilk_for is able to be run quickly on one thread, the Cilk Plus runtime may not actually spawn work on other available threads. In this case, if the loop contained a data race, Parallel Inspector threading analysis would not find it. Parallel Inspector detects races between threads, and so will find races between different tasks only if those tasks are mapped to different threads. You are only likely to find a potential data race if you run your program with a variety of different data sets that cause a variety of different mappings of tasks to threads.

Memory Analysis:
As with Threading Analysis, Parallel Inspector Memory Analysis could report false positives in either the user’s code or the Cilk Plus runtime. These false positives should be handled in the same way recommended above. There is one additional item to be aware of when running Memory Analysis on Cilk Plus code, which is that you should not use the highest level of memory analysis. Using the highest level of memory checking also enables a stack access analysis, which currently may result in incorrect operation of the Cilk Plus application and data collection failure. Even without this feature enabled, Parallel Inspector may sometimes report incorrect call stacks for Cilk Plus code.

Summary and Where to Go for Help
Cilk Plus provides the user with the ability to easily serialize their code (that is, have the compiler ignore the Cilk Plus keywords) using the option –Qcilk-serialize. This option can be used to help you sort out false positives due to Cilk Plus code, but this is not a necessary step. As mentioned in the introduction, Parallel Inspector should analyze projects containing Cilk Plus code without crashing. With the exceptions given above, the results of either Memory or Thread Checking may contain false positives but should be otherwise complete. For additional help, please post a question on the Intel Parallel Studio forum or submit an issue using http://premier.intel.com.

Intel® Parallel Studio – supported versions

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Intel® Parallel Studio - supported versions

Interactive support for Intel® Parallel Studio is provided via Intel® Premier Support or the Intel® Parallel Studio User Forum. Interactive support for older versions are only supported via the Intel® Parallel Studio User Forum.

If you have any questions on the above policy, please contact Intel® Premier Support or post on the Intel Parallel Studio User Forum. Refer to Intel® Premier support frequently asked questions link for useful information.

The following Studio versions are currently supported:

• Current release:
- Intel® Parallel Studio 2011 for Windows* Service Pack 1 (SP1)

• Previous releases:
- Intel® Parallel Studio 2011 for Windows* (Initial Release and above)

How to change the Parallel Studio version integrated into Visual Studio

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 19:00:00 -0700

Problem :
Only one version of Intel® Parallel Studio can be integrated with any one version of Microsoft Visual Studio* at a time. Therefore, if you have Intel Parallel Studio installed on your system and then install a different version along side of it, the newly installed version will be integrated into Visual Studio in place of the previously installed version - this means you will see the newly installed Parallel Studio toolbars, menu items, etc.

You can control which version of Intel Parallel Studio you use with a particular Visual Studio by performing the steps outlined below.

Environment:
Windows systems with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, 2008, and/or 2010 installed along with multiple versions of Intel Parallel Studio.

Root Cause:
Limit of one Parallel Studio integrated with a version of Visual Studio.

Resolution:
You will need to change the version of Parallel Studio that is integrated with a particular version of Visual Studio. This will need to be done for each component of the Parallel Studio that you have installed.

Begin by removing the integration from the version that is currently integrated.

For Intel Parallel Amplifier or Intel Parallel Inspector, start by opening the Command Prompt window for the version of Parallel Studio you wish to disable. For example:

To open an Intel Parallel Studio 2011 command prompt in the Visual Studio 2005 mode:

Start > All Programs > Intel Parallel Studio 2011 > Command Prompt > IA 32 Visual Studio 2005 mode.

To open an Intel Parallel Studio command prompt in the Visual Studio 2008 mode:

Start > All Programs > Intel Parallel Studio > Command Prompt > IA 32 Visual Studio 2008 mode.

Now invoke the appropriate script to disable the integration:

Tool	Visual Studio 2005	Visual Studio 2008	Visual Studio 2010
Intel Parallel Amplifier	ampl-vsreg disable vs2005	ampl-vsreg disable vs2008	ampl-vsreg disable vs2010
Intel Parallel Amplifier 2011	ampl-vsreg --disable 2005	ampl-vsreg --disable 2008	ampl-vsreg --disable 2010
Intel Parallel Inspector	insp-vsreg disable vs2005	insp-vsreg disable vs2008	insp-vsreg disable vs2010
Intel Parallel Inspector 2011	insp-vsreg --disable 2005	insp-vsreg --disable 2008	insp-vsreg --disable 2010

For Intel Parallel Composer use the Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs for the version you want to disable:

Select Modify and disable the following options:

○ Integrated Documentation
○ Intel Parallel Debugger Extension
○ Integration(s) in Microsoft Visual Studio

Select Next > Modify

Enable the Visual Studio integration.

For Intel Parallel Amplifier or Intel Parallel Inspector, start by opening the Command Prompt window for the version of Parallel Studio you wish to enable, then invoke the appropriate script to enable the integration:

Tool	Visual Studio 2005	Visual Studio 2008	Visual Studio 2010
Intel Parallel Amplifier	ampl-vsreg integrate vs2005	ampl-vsreg integrate vs2008	ampl-vsreg integrate vs2010
Intel Parallel Amplifier 2011	ampl-vsreg --integrate 2005	ampl-vsreg --integrate 2008	ampl-vsreg --integrate 2010
Intel Parallel Inspector	insp-vsreg integrate vs2005	insp-vsreg integrate vs2008	insp-vsreg integrate vs2010
Intel Parallel Inspector 2011	insp-vsreg --integrate 2005	insp-vsreg --integrate 2008	insp-vsreg --integrate 2010

For Intel Parallel Composer use the Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs entry for the version you want to enable:

Select Modify and enable the following options:

○ Integrated Documentation
○ Intel Parallel Debugger Extension
○ Integration(s) in Microsoft Visual Studio

Select the Visual Studio versions you would like to enable integration with.
Select Next > Modify

Installation Error "HelpLibAgent.exe has stopped working" When Installing or Uninstalling Intel Parallel Studio 2011

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 21:00:00 -0700

When installing or uninstalling Intel(R) Parallel Studio 2011 on a system with Microsoft* Visual Studio 2010*, you may see the error message "HelpLibAgent.exe has stopped working":

Select "Close the program" to continue.

This error does not prevent the installation or uninstallation of Intel Parallel Studio 2011. It is an issue from a 3rd party tool. It does no harm to your system.

How to get the local help documentation of Intel Parallel Studio 2011 within a non-English Visual Studio 2010 environment

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 21:00:00 -0700

Reference Number : DPD200159046

Version : 2011
Product :

Intel(R) Parallel Studio 2011
Intel(R) Parallel Advisor 2011
Intel(R) Parallel Composer 2011
Intel(R) Parallel Amplifier 2011
Intel(R) Parallel Inspector 2011

Operating System :
Windows OS with non-English Microsoft Visual Studio 2010* only

Problem Description :
On a Windows system with non-English Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, after installing the Intel Parallel Studio 2011, when you access the help documentation from menu "Help -> Intel Parallel Studio 2011 -> Parallel Studio Help -> Composer Help or Amplifier Help or Inspector Help or Advisor Help" within Visual Studio 2010, you will get an error that the local help does not exist.

Resolution Status :
This is a known issue and the work-around is below.

Open your non-English Visual Studio 2010, select the equivalent menu "Help -> Manage Help Settings"; The "Help Library Manager" dialog will be displayed as below in locale language:
Select 4th item "Intell content from disk" on the list from above dialog; it will ask you to locate the help media (*.msha file), and you can find the following 7 help media provided by the Intel Parallel Studio 2011:
- [install-dir]\Parallel Studio 2011\Advisor\documentation\msvhelp\en\helpcontentsetup.msha
- [install-dir]\Parallel Studio 2011\Amplifier\documentation\msvhelp\en\helpcontentsetup.msha
- [install-dir]\Parallel Studio 2011\Inspector\documentation\msvhelp\en\helpcontentsetup.msha
- [install-dir]\Parallel Studio 2011\Composer\Documentation\msvhelp\1033\compiler_c\helpcontentsetup.msha
- [install-dir]\Parallel Studio 2011\Composer\Documentation\msvhelp\1033\idb\helpcontentsetup.msha
- [install-dir]\Parallel Studio 2011\Composer\Documentation\msvhelp\1033\ipp\helpcontentsetup.msha
- [install-dir]\Parallel Studio 2011\Composer\Documentation\msvhelp\1033\tbb\helpcontentsetup.msha
* For default installation, the [install-dir] is "c:\program files\intel" or "c:\program files (x86)\intel" on x64 OS.

Select only one of the help media above, you will see another screen like below:

Scroll the horizontal-bar to the right, under the "Action" column, click "Add", and then click on the "Update" button. This will install the help media with Visual Studio 2010. When the installation is finished, you should be able to access this help documentation from menu "Help -> Intel Parallel Studio 2011...".
Go-through step #2 again to install all the 7 help media.
Then you can access the Intel Parallel Studio help within Visual Studio 2010.

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Intel® Parallel Studio 2011 Checksums

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The following checksums are created using the cksum utility which is based on the ISO/IEC 8802-3:1996 standard (Ethernet). For more information please see one of the following web sites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cksum
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/cksum.html

If you have any questions about the issues discussed in this report, please post on the user forums, http://software.intel.com/en-us/forums or submit an issue to Intel Premier Support, https://premier.intel.com

Intel® Parallel Studio 2011 Service Pack 1 (SP1)
CKSUM=3365828477 SIZE=627622552 parallel_studio_2011_sp1_setup.exe

Intel® Parallel Studio 2011 Update 2
CKSUM=2715740144 SIZE=548895512 parallel_studio_2011_update2_setup.exe

Intel® Parallel Studio 2011 Update 1
CKSUM=862107810 SIZE=526883152 parallel_studio_2011_update1_setup.exe

Intel® Parallel Studio 2011 Initial Release
CKSUM=854992344 SIZE=512030968 parallel_studio_2011_setup.exe

Intel Parallel Inspector Support

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 21:00:00 -0700

Intel^® Parallel Inspector Support

Get Started

Watch the Intel^® Parallel Studio 2011 Getting Started video! This 10 minute video shows you how to parallelize, verify, and tune the N-Queens sample application.
Intel Parallel Studio Quick Evaluation Guides - Simple, step-by-step evaluation guides show how Intel Parallel Studio delivers everything you need for reliable, higher performing applications.
Attend a live Technical Presentation - Learn about a specific product feature. Ask any questions about the product, too.
Intel^® Learning Lab Portal - Access a range of resources to help you optimize the performance, productivity, and reliability of serial and parallel applications from desktop to device.

Get Help or Advice

Search Support Articles
Forums - The best place for timely answers from our technical experts and your peers. Use it even for bug reports.
Support - For secure, web-based, engineer-to-engineer support, visit our Intel^® Premier Support web site. Intel Premier Support registration is required.
Download, Registration and Licensing Help - Specific help for download, registration, and licensing questions.

Resources

Release Notes - View Intel Parallel Inspector Release Notes online!
Product Documentation - View Intel Parallel Inspector documentation online!
Browse Support Articles