Last week I mentioned a 20 Questions Competition being run by Intel. I was interested in seeing how difficult the questions were, and suggesting how you might be able to find out the answers (and enter the competition). I thought I'd use three different ways to find the answers to the competition questions.

Each day, starting on June 14 through the following 20 work days, a question will be posted here. You can win by correctly answering a question. The first question has already been published along with the answer. Here's my attempt at finding the answer.

Question 1

Question: Intel Parallel Composer: What compiler switch turns on auto-parallelization in Intel Parallel Composer?

Method 1: Google it.

Putting the whole question in google came up with over 5000 references — not all of them relevant.

On the first page I picked out three that seemed obvious the place to get the answer.

Intel 20 Questions Contest — Question 1 — Intel Software Network

Go Parallel | Optimization Techniques for Intel Multicore ...

Intel® Guide for Developing Multithreaded Applications

Method 2: Trying it out

For this you need to download and install an evaluation version of Intel Parallel Studio. Once you have opened a project, then the properties box contains the relevant option.

Method 3: Read the manual.

I have to admit, reading the manual is the last thing I ever do when stuck. The manual can be accessed from the help menu in Visual Studio (assuming you have already installed Parallel Studio). There are a number of different optimisation techniques listed.

Here's the description of the Auto Parallelisation.

The Correct Answer

Correct Answer: /Qparallel