Developer Guide for Intel® oneAPI Math Kernel Library for Linux*

Developer Guide

Contents

Techniques to Set the Number of Threads

Use the following techniques to specify the number of OpenMP threads to use in
Intel® oneAPI Math Kernel Library
:
  • Set one of the OpenMP or
    Intel® oneAPI Math Kernel Library
     environment variables:
    • OMP_NUM_THREADS
    • MKL_NUM_THREADS
    • MKL_DOMAIN_NUM_THREADS
  • Call one of the OpenMP or
    Intel® oneAPI Math Kernel Library
     functions:
    • omp_set_num_threads()
    • mkl_set_num_threads()
    • mkl_domain_set_num_threads()
    • mkl_set_num_threads_local()
A call to the
mkl_set_num_threads
 or
mkl_domain_set_num_threads
function changes the number of OpenMP threads available to all in-progress calls (in concurrent threads) and future calls to
Intel® oneAPI Math Kernel Library
 and may result in slow
Intel® oneAPI Math Kernel Library
 performance and/or race conditions reported by run-time tools, such as Intel® Inspector.
To avoid such situations, use the mkl_set_num_threads_local function (see the "Support Functions" section in the
Intel® oneAPI Math Kernel Library
 Developer Reference
 for the function description).
When choosing the appropriate technique, take into account the following rules:
  • The
    Intel® oneAPI Math Kernel Library
     threading controls take precedence over the OpenMP controls because they are inspected first.
  • A function call takes precedence over any environment settings. The exception, which is a consequence of the previous rule, is that a call to the OpenMP subroutine
    omp_set_num_threads()
    does not have precedence over the settings of
    Intel® oneAPI Math Kernel Library
     environment variables such as
    MKL_NUM_THREADS
    . See Using Additional Threading Control for more details.
  • You cannot change run-time behavior in the course of the run using the environment variables because they are read only once at the first call to
    Intel® oneAPI Math Kernel Library
    .
If you use the Intel TBB threading technology, read the documentation for the
tbb::task_scheduler_init
 class at https://www.threadingbuildingblocks.org/documentation to find out how to specify the number of threads.

Product and Performance Information

1

Performance varies by use, configuration and other factors. Learn more at www.Intel.com/PerformanceIndex.