Kenneth Raffenetti <[email protected]> writes:

The Intel compilers could also be a source of slowdown. Are they installed on a network filesystem? They may also call out to a network license server each time they are invoked for a compile test. Does just compiling a small program take a long time with icc, ifort, etc.?

The system headers and libraries are also often on a network file system. Although moving the source tree to a local disk usually provides some improvement, I rarely find it getting anywhere close to the performance of a cheap laptop because most of the file accesses performed by the compiler are hitting the network anyway. This is the price we all pay for legacy file system semantics and dumb compiler architecture. I think most companies in a place to change these things do full local installs on their development boxes so that compilation is fast. And the HPC vendors wear blindfolds and put their heads in the sand. As for Intel license servers, this is the price you pay for anti-piracy measures. People that are really ticked off by this crack their compilers---the pirates enjoy a better user experience. Is it ethical to use a cracked version if you've already paid for the licensed version? Besides those issues, the Intel compiler usually takes a lot longer to compile. It's worth building with gcc and clang to compare. You might be pleasantly surprised to find that in addition to compiling faster, your code also runs faster (this is the case for several applications I work with).