XL C/C++ for Blue Gene/Q

Overview
Features & benefits
System Requirements

Improve performance of HPC applications and developer productivity

Provides powerful, industry-leading optimization features to professional Blue Gene programmers to develop, extend, and manage HPC, scalable business and web applications.

Highly advanced standards-based optimizing compilers are professional programming tools for creating and maintaining applications in the C and C++ programming languages.

Exploits the new Blue Gene/Q system for increased value and reduced costs.
Maximizes application performance through XL Compiler industry leading optimization technology for better system utilization and cost reduction.
Improves developer productivity with access to highly-tuned libraries, directives, and options that simplify programming, shorten the development cycle and reduce risk.
Eases application migration to Blue Gene/Q through conformance to the latest international programming standards protecting application investments.
What’s New with XL C/C++ for Blue Gene/Q, V12.1 including enhancements to help programmers improve performance of their compute intensive applications.
Operating systems supported: Linux

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XL C/C++ for Blue Gene/Q resources

XL C/C++ for Blue Gene/Q library
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XL C/C++ for Blue Gene/Q

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Feature	Benefit
Industry leading optimization and performance tuning technology
Supports the Quad Processing eXtension (QPX) instruction set of the Blue Gene/Q platform.	Simplifies and improves manipulation of vector operations in applications.
Thread-level speculative execution uses hardware support that dynamically detects thread conflicts and rolls back conflicting threads for re-execution.	Improves application performance without rewriting the program code.
Transactional memory to control concurrent memory accesses in the scope of parallel programming.	Simplifies parallel programming by grouping read and write operations and running them like a single operation.
Support for 64-bit application development.	Simplifies the development of large C or C++ applications.
Many compiler suboptions for more fine-grained control over optimizations and transformations that violate strict program semantics.	The addition of the suboptions relaxes selected rules to get specific benefits of faster code without turning off all semantic verifications.
Compiler optimization reports provide information about the optimizations that the compiler was able to perform and also which optimizations were missed.	Reports about compiler optimizations identify opportunities to improve code performance thereby reducing programming effort to tune applications.
High performance libraries specifically tuned for Blue Gene/Q
Enhanced Mathematical Acceleration Subsystem (MASS) and MASS Vector libraries of mathematical intrinsic functions tuned specifically for Blue Gene/Q. Shared memory parallelization (SMP) runtime library supports both explicit and automatic parallel processing.	These libraries will increase user productivity, and runtime application performance speeding initial development, resulting in fewer bugs and cutting long-term maintenance costs.
Debugging capabilities
XL compilers generate debugging information for use by a symbolic debugger.	XL compilers help increase programmer productivity and lower maintenance costs by providing information consumable by standard symbolic debugging tools. The user benefits from a familiar development environment using debugging tools of choice with increased proficiency and productivity, debugging source and optimized code.
Improved capability for debugging optimized code.	Users can balance between debug capability and application performance.
Language standards compliance
Supports: Default language level for C compilations changed to the C99 standard ISO/IEC 9899:1999 (C99) ISO/IEC 9899:1990 (C89) ISO/IEC 9899:2011 (C11) partial support begins ISO/IEC 14882:2003 (C++03) ISO/IEC 14882:1998 (C++98) ISO/IEC 14882:2011 (C++11) partial support continues	XL compilers comply with the latest international programming language standards, including language interoperability standards, providing support for code portability between multiple operating systems and hardware platforms. XL compilers help protect the investment in existing C/C++ source and object code built with previous versions of the compilers allowing users to rebuild and link all the components into the same applications using the latest compiler versions,. Similarly, object code or libraries compiled with previous versions of XL C/C++ are still compatible with the newest XL C/C++ compiler and runtime environment.
Full support for the latest OpenMP 3.1 specification providing new features to support the development of parallel applications.	OpenMP is a portable, scalable programming model that provides parallel programmers a simple and flexible, standard interface for developing parallel applications for platforms ranging from the desktop to the supercomputer.
New built-in functions for atomic memory access, whose behavior corresponds to that provided by GNU Compiler Collection (GCC).	In a program with multiple threads, users can use these functions to atomically and safely modify data in one thread without interference from another thread.
New built-in functions provided for thread-level speculative execution.	Users can retrieve statistical information, write statistics into log files, or switch mode to transactional memory (TM) at runtime.
New built-in functions provided for transactional memory.	Users can retrieve statistical information, write statistics into log files, or switch mode to thread-level speculative execution (SE) at runtime.
New built-in functions provided for Quad Processing Extension (QPX).	Users can access individual elements of vectors and manipulate vectors.

Operating System	Software	Hardware
Linux	For program compilation on a Blue Gene/Q front-end node; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 (RHEL 6.2) for IBM POWER, and an instance of RHEL 6.2 gcc 4.4.5 For application execution on a Blue Gene/Q system: GNU Toolchain built for Blue Gene/Q based on gcc 4.4.5 and glibc 2.1.2 Frames-capable browser to view HTML-based online documentation PDF viewer to view documentation in Portable Document Format (PDF) Graphical desktop environment (such as K Desktop Environment (KDE) or GNOME) that supports web browsers and PDF viewers	IBM Blue Gene/Q system 300 MB disk space