- Summary of latest changes
- The Intel® Manycore Platform Software Stack: Description, and supported Operating Systems
- Downloads
- Archive of previous Intel® MPSS releases
- How to receive notification of future updates
- Additional Documentation
- Where to ask questions
Summary of (latest) changes
Here we will list the most recent changes made to the Intel® MPSS so that if you've subscribed to get notifications on updates, you'll be able to quickly determine whether this applies to you.
- July 14, 2014: Intel® MPSS 3.3 released for Linux and Windows
- May 24, 2014: Intel® MPSS 3.2.3 released for Linux and Windows
- April 10, 2014: Intel® MPSS 3.2.1 released for Linux and Windows
- March 17, 2014: Intel® MPSS 3.2 released for Linux and Windows
- March 13, 2014: Intel® MPSS 2.1 patch 6720-23 released for Linux
- February 28, 2014: Intel® MPSS 3.1.4-1 released for Linux and Windows
- December 20 2013: Intel® MPSS 3.1.2 released for Linux and Windows. Note the addition of RedHat Enterprise Linux 6.5 support.
- December 5 2013: Intel® MPSS 3.1.1 released for Linux and Windows
- November 7 2013: Published source code for unmodified GPL components for Linux Intel® MPSS 3.1 release
- October 31 2013: Published Intel® MPSS Performance Guide (see Additional Documentation section)
- October 24 2013: Posted First MPSS 3.1 release for Linux
- October 22 2013: Posted MPSS hotfix 2.1.6720-23
- October 7 2013: Added Chinese and Japanese translations of the readme file for Microsoft* Windows Yocto (3.1) release
- September 29 2013: Added Microsoft* Windows Yocto (3.1) release
About the Intel® Manycore Platform Software Stack
The "Intel® Manycore Platform Software Stack." is necessary to run the Intel® Xeon Phi Coprocessor. Users often call this stack "MPSS" for short. It is dependent on Linux kernels 2.6.34 or later , and it has been tested to work with specific versions of 64-bit Operating Systems:
- Red Hat Enterprise 6.0, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4 and 6.5 (for MPSS 3.2 and earlier releases); versions 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5 and 7.0 (MPSS 3.3.+)
- SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 SP1 and SP2 (MPSS 2.1 release) and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 SP2 and SP3 (MPSS 3.x release)
- Microsoft* Windows 7 Enterprise SP1, Windows 8 Enterprise, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and Windows Server 2012
The readme files (referenced in the Download section) have more information on how to build and install the stack.
The open source updates we have made are in support of the instruction set, the ABI, initializing and controlling an SMP on-a-chip, and the glue software to support the coprocessor communication with the host system. The changes in the Linux kernel are primarily for three reasons:
- Numerous little changes to support the unique combination of an Intel® Pentium® processor core that also supports 64-bits including the Intel® Initial Many Core Instructions (Intel® IMCI).
- Power management, which is a feature not associated with the original Pentium processors. Power management is much more important when you have up to 61 cores on a single die
- The Intel® Many Integrated Core (MIC) check architecture, also a feature not present in the original Pentium processor designs.
The Symmetric Communications InterFace (SCIF) is included in the RPM bundle. SCIF provides a mechanism for inter-node communications within a single platform. A node, for SCIF purposes, is defined as either a Intel® Xeon Phi Coprocessor or the Intel® Xeon® processor. In particular, SCIF abstracts the details of communicating over the PCI Express bus. The SCIF APIs are callable from both user space (uSCIF) and kernel-space (kSCIF).
The MPSS is downloadable from the sources below. Note that these packages include documentation and APIs (e.g. SCIF API).
Please note: the Linux* MPSS download files marked '.gz' should end in '.gz' when downloaded; most browsers leave the extension alone, but Windows Explorer may rename the files. If this affects you, we recommend renaming the file to the proper extension after downloading.
If it is necessary for you to access slightly older releases of the MPSS, please visit the archive at: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-manycore-platform-software-stack-mpss-archive
Getting notified of future updates
Do you want to receive updates when we publish a new MPSS stack? Click on the 'Subscribe' button at the bottom of this page to be notified when this document gets updated!
Downloads
There are currently 4 major releases available of the MPSS; The 2.1 release is an evolution of the MPSS that Intel originally released in November of 2012. The 3.1 (YOCTO) release is new as of September 2013 and is organized very differently from the original 2.1 release. the 3.2 release as of May 2014. And, the most recent major release is 3.3.
We recommend new adopters to start by using the 3.3 release. We recommend existing users who are still using the 2.1 release stream to read this FAQ and migrate to the 3.3 release as soon as feasible for them, to inherit new features and bug fixes as they become available over time. Support for each Intel® MPSS release ends 1 year from the date it was posted.
Get the MPSS 2.1 release for Linux*
Get the MPSS 3.3.* release for Linux* Get the MPSS 3.3.* release for Microsoft* Windows
MPSS 2.1 release for Linux*
MPSS version | Downloads available | Size | MD5 Checksum |
---|---|---|---|
RedHat 6.0 | 292MB | 796a9b7b09be76811ddc96bd5de10788 | |
RedHat 6.1 | 293MB | 83bcfd31cd6f882584684b2a2c25fb97 | |
mpss_gold_update_3-2.1.6720-23 (released: March 13 2014) | RedHat 6.2 | 293MB | 586ced0c807416dceeb97945fe5cba45 |
RedHat 6.3 | 293MB | 0d2af7ec352556f06381337ae507b69a | |
RedHat 6.4 | 289MB | b8c019f523be4a6775a495b9fe86f735 | |
SuSE SLES11 SP1 | 292MB | aa7f9c14e34d4a58918c0a6c929e36c1 | |
SuSE SLES11 SP2 | 287MB | c4a15e78664b2962489e7716c3fca1b6 | |
RedHat SOURCE | 430MB | 098a780d274b063dcff71a7b545947e1 | |
SuSE SLES11 SOURCE | 430MB | 707262110fe8373a5c2876991282cdd9 |
Documentation link | Description | Last Updated On | Size |
---|---|---|---|
releaseNotes-linux.txt | English - release notes | Mar 2014 | 54KB |
readme-en.txt | English (includes installation instructions) | Mar 2014 | 97KB |
MPSS_Cluster_Setup_Guide.pdf | Cluster Setup Guide | April 2013 | 644KB |
MPSS_Boot_Config_Guide.pdf | Advanced Configuration Guide for MPSS | June 2013 | 911KB |
license.txt | INTEL SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT for Intel® Manycore Platform Software Stack (Intel® MPSS) | 30KB |
MPSS 3.3 release for Linux
Note: Previous Intel® MPSS 3.X releases provided distribution-branded tarballs (for example: mpss-3.2-rhel-6.4.tar) for the stack, including the user-space rpms. Starting with this release a single distribution-agnostic tarball will be available, which will include kernel-space rpms that are precompiled for specific kernel versions. (As with previous releases, kernel source rpms will be available to support other kernel versions). The new tarball is called “mpss-3.3-linux.tar”. Key features of this specific release are described here
MPSS version | Downloads available | Size (range) | MD5 Checksum |
---|---|---|---|
mpss-3.3 (released: July 14 2014) | Linux (mpss-3.3-linux.tar) for RedHat 6.2, RedHat 6.3, RedHat 6.4, RedHat 6.5,RedHat 7.0, SuSE SLES11 SP2, SuSE SLES11 SP3 | ~400MB | 769f1bbcf8f848fb4ffd652154bfe124 |
k1om (mpss-3.3-k1om.tar) | ~700MB | e8f924dfb4ea334f1051ba1a5d35730e | |
SOURCE (mpss-src-3.3.tar) | ~250MB | 46e5951526bc5581bbcb01947df54a5f | |
Download Cache (mpss-downloadcache-3.3.tar) | ~1.1GB | e1ddc42cbe8dfb6483c7298e33395ddb |
Documentation link | Description | Last Updated On | Size (approx) |
---|---|---|---|
releaseNotes-linux.txt | English - Release Notes | July 2014 | ~80KB |
readme.txt | Readme (includes installation instructions) for Linux (English) | July 2014 | ~25KB |
MPSS_Users_Guide.pdf | Complete Users Guide for MPSS for Linux (English) | July 2014 | ~2MB |
SCIF_UserGuide.pdf | SCIF User guide | July 2014 | ~700KB |
license.txt | INTEL SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT for Intel® Manycore Platform Software Stack (Intel® MPSS) | July 2013 | ~30KB |
MPSS 3.3 release for Microsoft* Windows
MPSS version | Downloads available | Size | MD5 Checksum |
---|---|---|---|
mpss-3.3-windows.zip (released: July 14 2014) | Microsoft* Windows | ~300MB | baeafb1cee15ae778ba94c212fb758f1 |
Documentation link | Description | Last Updated On | Size |
---|---|---|---|
releaseNotes-windows.txt | English - release notes | July 2014 | ~21KB |
readme-windows.pdf | English (includes installation instructions) for Microsoft* Windows | July 2014 | ~660KB |
MPSS_Users_Guide-windows.pdf | User, Cluster and Advanced Configuration Guide for MPSS | July 2014 | ~2MB |
Additional documentation
There is additional documentation in the MPSS packages, more specifically: a Platform Status Panel User Guide (in /opt/intel/mic/sysmgt/docs) and MIC_SCIF_API_Reference_Manual* and User guides in /opt/intel/mic/scif/docs. On the MPSS 3.x releases, these are in /usr/share/doc/sysmgmt and /usr/share/doc/scif
Additionally, there is a document attached at the bottom of this article, the Intel® MPSS Performance Guide, which documents best known methods for fine tuning the Intel® MPSS runtime environment for best application performance.
http://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/managed/72/db/mpss-performance-guide.pdf
Where to ask questions
The discussion forum at http://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/intel-many-integrated-core is available to join and discuss any enhancements or issues with the MPSS.
Information about Intel® MPSS security can be found here