Intel Parallel Studio XE 2018 Update2

Intel Parallel Studio XE boosts performance, increases productivity, and eases scalability more than ever for HPC and compute-intensive applications. Whether you build for big data analytics, machine and deep learning, or thousands of other performance-critical applications, this tool-packed suite harnesses the full capabilities inside Intel Xeon and Xeon Phi processors and coprocessors.
Intel Parallel Studio XE Cluster Edition. Cluster Edition adds cluster tools: Intel Cluster Checker, an expert system for analyzing cluster diagnostics, Intel Trace Analyzer and Collector for MPI tuning and analysis, and the Intel MPI Library.

Intel announced the release of Intel Parallel Studio XE 2018, with updated compilers and developer tools. This release of the fully supported product is notable with new features that further enhance the toolset for accelerating HPC applications.

One of those new features worth taking a look at is Application Snapshot in Intel VtuneTM Amplifier, which gives you a quick look at an application’s performance profile to see how well, or badly, optimized it is for the latest hardware. This performance snapshot gives easy-to-understand displays of various metrics, including CPU utilization, memory operations and stalls, FPU utilization, MPI and OpenMP parallelism, and I/O efficiency. It also gives recommendations for further analysis, and supports Intel MPI, MPICH, and Cray MPI. Application Snapshot gives immediate feedback to help determine if an application needs performance tuning.

The compilers have been updated to generate highly optimized code for Intel Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (Intel AVX-512) instructions for Intel Xeon and Xeon PhiTM processors. Intel follows programming language standards very closely, including drafts not yet official. Intel compilers support full C11, C++14, and the draft C++17 standards. Also, the suite includes Parallel STL* for parallel and vector execution of the C++ Standard Template Library.

Both full Fortran 2008 and the draft Fortran 2015 standard are supported, as well as the Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 shell. The C/C++/Fortran compilers not only implement the latest OpenMP 4.5 shared memory parallelization specifications, but many of the proposed 5.0 features as well.

Intel continues to demonstrate its commitment to scientific Python with this release of Intel Parallel Studio XE 2018. This “accelerated” Python distribution uses optimized memory management and libraries (including the Intel Math Kernel Library) to take advantage of the latest multicore and vector hardware. Up to 20x performance improvements have been noted.

The 2018 release also adds new, broader redistribution rights for Intel Performance Libraries and Intel Distribution for Python.

What's new in Intel Parallel Studio XE 2018:
The Intel Fortran Compiler now supports all features from the Fortran 2008 standard.
Additional Fortran 2008 features added in the Intel Fortran 18.0 release are noted below:
- COMPILER_OPTIONS and COMPILER_VERSION in ISO_FORTRAN_ENV
- COMPLEX arguments to trigonometric and hyperbolic intrinsic functions
- FINDLOC intrinsic function
- Optional argument BACK in MAXLOC and MINLOC intrinsic functions
- Multiple type-bound procedures in a PROCEDURE list
- Passing a non-pointer data item to a pointer dummy argument
- Polymorphic assignment with allocatable Left Hand Side (LHS)
- Allocatable components of recursive type and forward reference
- Data statement restrictions removed

Language features for task reductions from the OpenMP* Technical Report 4: Version 5.0 Preview 1 specifications are now supported.

Intel Visual Fortran Compiler 18.0 for Windows Release Notes for Intel Parallel Studio XE 2018:

This document provides a summary of new and changed product features and includes notes about features and problems not described in the product documentation.