Beijing's Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) and Intel have released the latest software compiler for researchers to run Linux on computers built with the chip-maker's Itanium processors.
Version 2.0 of the Open Research Compiler (ORC) was co-developed by the ICT, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Intel to help global research work on Linux in high-performance computing systems.
Since the first version's release last year, the compiler has been downloaded more than 4,000 times by Linux programmers at universities and research institutes worldwide.
The ORC 2.0 source code was released last week, and is available from ipf-orc.sourceforge.net.
Compilers are like translators. They translate software programming languages such as C, C++ and FORTRAN, and turn them into language that computers understand. The more efficient the translation, the more performance a computer can provide to the software application.
High-performance computer microprocessors, like those of Intel's 64-bit Itanium chip range, have so-called 'multiple instruction units' to perform multiple tasks in parallel.
Modern compilers must be able to identify such 'parallel' computing activity in the source code and assign tasks to keep all the instruction units busy. As computer chip architecture improves, more advanced compiler techniques are required.