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Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

Intel is abandoning their compiler infrastructure and moving everything to Clang/LLVM. This does mean pushing their autovectorization work into LLVM, although judging from the quality of conversation in the vectorization BoF at the latest developer's meeting, it's not clear how much work they wish to put in to actually making acceptable upstreamable patches.

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It sure would be nice if MKL could be integrated in clang. It's still the fastest LAPACK implementation. I use it on a relatively powerfull cluster (~11k cores) at university for doing quantum chemical calculations in Dalton, and having more research software as open source would benefit everyone in the end I believe.

Here here!

I run into this often, it is amazing the speedup MKL provides for linear algebra heavy scientific computations and it is under this weirdly commercial, but permissively redistrubutable framework which means a lot of folks are using it unkowningly in a gray licensing area.

See the pre-build python Numpy/Scipy packages that use it and are often use by data science types:

http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#numpy

Not sure about Chris's licensing of MKL, but Continuum has a redistributable license of MKL packaged into their numpy builds for Anaconda - https://www.continuum.io/blog/developer-blog/anaconda-25-rel...

Intel has a Python distribution which bundles MKL as well: https://software.intel.com/en-us/intel-distribution-for-pyth...

> Intel is abandoning their compiler infrastructure and moving everything to Clang/LLVM

Source?

Note that GCC at one point did pretty much everything icc did for vectorization (though this is circa 2008 and not sure if folks have kept to date on caring).

There isn't a lot of magic here, it's all just hard work and good cost models.

http://polaris.cs.uiuc.edu/~garzaran/doc/pact11.pdf suggests that gcc is only doing ~50% of what icc is doing for vectorization on TSVC, although the experimental speedups on PACT and MediaBench was fairly close (23% versus 28%).

Do you have any citations to back this up? I am a user and not seeing any of this taking place.

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