So this is probably a straight forward question: but I am working with Fortran on my macbook pro, and am trying to explore co-arrays for parallel processing. I have both IFORT and GCC, and can compile regular code using both.
In reading intel's website I can see they support co-arrays, but not on mac. I also see posts online about using mac + open-coarrays + GCC. I am trying to understand what is open-coarrays and why is it not required for ifort, but ifort doesn't suppourt on mac?
Intel Fortran uses its own coarray library and Intel MPI - it is not compatible with OpenCoarrays. Intel MPI is not supported on MacOS, so Intel doesn't support coarrays there. When I was working at Intel I tried to get management interested in finding a solution for Mac users, perhaps using OpenMPI instead, but got no takers. The usage of ifort on MacOS is low, and with Apple having announced that they are switching to ARM, I'd expect Intel's further interest in MacOS to be even lower.
OpenCoarrays is an open-source coarray support library that gfortran (part of the Gnu Compiler Collection or GCC) can use. The intent is that it could be used by multiple compilers. Intel had developed its own coarray support years earlier, so they would have little interest in ripping all of that up to switch to OpenCoarrays.
