Introduction to Optimizing Applications

The Optimizing Applications document explains how you can use the Intel® Fortran Compiler to enhance application performance. The variety of optimizations provided by the Intel® compiler enables you to enhance the performance of your application. Each optimization is performed by a set of options discussed in the sections of this volume. In addition to optimizations invoked by the compiler command line options, the compiler includes features which enhance your application performance such as directives, intrinsics, run-time library routines and various utilities.

Where applicable, this document explains how compiler options and optimization methods apply differently on IA-32, Itanium®, and Intel® Extended Memory 64 Technology (Intel® EM64T) architectures.

This guide to optimizing applications covers the following sections and topics:

Programming for high performance:

• Optimizing Performance Overview

• Applying Performance Enhancement Strategies

• Using a Performance Enhancement Methodology

• Setting Data Type and Alignment

• Using Arrays Efficiently

• Improving I/O Performance

• Improving Run-time Efficiency

• Using Intrinsics for Itanium®-based Systems

• Coding Guidelines for Intel Architectures

• Using Intel® Performance Analysis Tools

• Timing your Application

Intel® compiler Optimizations:

• Compiler Optimization Overview

• Efficient Compilation

• Optimizing Different Application Types

• Floating-Point Arithmetic Optimizations

• Optimizing for Specific Processors

• Interprocedural Optimizations (IPO)

• Profile-guided Optimizations (PGO)

• High-level Language Optimizations (HLO)

• Compiler Reports

Parallel programming:

• Parallelism Overview

• Auto-vectorization (IA-32 Only)

• Auto-parallelization

• Parallelization with OpenMP*

Optimization support features:

• Optimization Support Features Overview