Fluid Animate Sample with Profile-Guided Optimization

Fluid animate is one of a class of algorithms for calculating fluid flow. This sample uses the serial implementation to demonstrate the use of Intel Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) without any code change.The PGO of Intel® C++ Compiler improves application performance by reorganizing code layout to reduce instruction-cache problems and branch mispredictions. With the collected application runtime information Intel C++ Compiler is able to be more selective and specific in optimizing the application. This may also help with application size introduced by aggressive inlining. You can find more in-depth explanation in this article Guide to Profile-guided Optimization of Computational Fluid Dynamics with Intel® Compiler.

System Requirements:

Hardware:
- Any Intel® processor like 2nd Generation Intel® Core™ i3, i5, or i7 processors and Intel® Xeon® E3 or E5 processor family
For Microsoft* Windows*:
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2013*, 2015* or 2017* Professional Edition or above
- Intel® Parallel Studio XE 2019 Composer Edition for C++ Windows* or newer
  or
  Intel® System Studio 2019 Composer Edition for Windows* or newer
For Linux*:
- GNU* GCC 4.5 or newer
- Intel® Parallel Studio XE 2019 Composer Edition for C++ Linux* or newer
  or
  Intel® System Studio 2018 Composer Edition for Linux* or newer
For macOS*:
- macOS* 10.12 or above
- Xcode* 8.x or above
- Intel® Parallel Studio XE 2019 Composer Edition for C++ macOS* or newer

Performance Gain with PGO

Build Instructions

PGO Speedup vs non PGO	Compiler (Intel® 64)	Compiler options	System specifications
Scalar 14% AN 7%	Intel® Parallel Studio XE 2019 Composer Edition for C++ Windows*	/O2 /Qipo /fp:fast /Oi /MD /EHsc /Qprof-dir "Intel-Release\"	Windows 7 Enterprise SP1 4th Gen Intel® Core™ i5-4300U CPU @ 1.90GHz + 4GB memory
Scalar 4% AN 4%	Intel® Parallel Studio XE 2019 Composer Edition for C++ macOS*	-O2 -ipo -fast -prof-dir ./intel-release	OS X* 10.11.3 3nd Gen Intel® Core™ i7-2635QM CPU @ 2GHZ + 8GB memory
Scalar 5% AN 9%	Intel® Parallel Studio XE 2019 Composer Edition for C++ Linux*	-O2 -ipo -fast -prof-dir ./intel-release	Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 7.1 5th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-5850HQ CPU @ 2.70GHz + 16GB memory

For Microsoft* Visual Studio* users:

Open Visual Studio and load the solution .sln file
Choose a configuration (for best performance, choose a release configuration):
- Intel-debug and Intel-release: uses Intel C++ compiler
- VSC-debug and VSC-release: uses Microsoft Visual C++* compiler
Run application to get a baseline run time for later use. Use "Intel-Release" configuration for performance testing
- Project Properties -> C/C++ -> Preprocessor -> Preprocessor Definitions: add PERF_NUM
Build with Intel C++ compiler PGO:
- In the Solution Explorer window right click on FluidAnimate project name, select "Intel Compiler -> Profile Guided Optimization". It brings up "Profile Guided Optimization Dialog.
- Without changing any default setting, click [Run] button. This step will start the following:
  - Build the FluidAnimate with /Qprof-gen option
  - Run the application to collect the profiling data
  - Rebuild the application with /Qprof-use option
  - At the end of this step the PGO optimized FluidAnimate binary is created at "profileguided_optimization_samples\x64\Intel-Release\FluidAnimate.exe"
Run PGO optimized binary to get the performance number: press Ctrl+F5 to run the application.

For Windows Command Line users:

For Intel C++ Compiler:
- Open the appropriate Intel C++ compiler command prompt
- Build and run the application normally without PGO:
  build
  build run -o 0
- Build with PGO:
  build pgo
  This command will complete the followings:
  - Build FluidAnimate with /Qprof-gen
  - Run the application to collect profile data
  - Rebuild FluidAnimate with /Qprof-use and generate PGO optimized binary "release\FuildAnimatePGO.exe"
[Optional]For Visual C++ Compiler:
- Open the appropriate Microsoft Visual Studio command prompt from the Start menu and navigate to project folder
- To compile: Build.bat [perf_num]
  - [perf_num]: collect performance numbers (will run example 5 times and average time taken)
- To run: Build.bat run

For Linux* or macOS* users:

From a terminal window, navigate to the project folder
For Intel C++ compiler:
- Set the environment: source <icc-install-dir>/bin/compilervars.sh ia32 or intel64
- To compile with PGO: run build.sh shell script "./Build.sh"
  This step completes the followings:
  - Generate an instrumented binary
  - Run the instrucmented binary to collect profile data
  - Build the application again using the profile data and generates PGO optimized binary release/FluidAnimatePGO
  To run the PGO optimized binary:
  cd release;./FluidAnimatePGO
[Optional] To use gcc* or clang*:
- To compile: make gcc [perf_num=1]
  - [perf_num=1]: collect performance numbers (will run example 5 times and average time taken)
- To run: make run

Applying the Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO) to Fluid Animate

Performance Gain with PGO

Build Instructions