HPCwire: PGI 9.0 Compilers Simplify x64+GPU Programming

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June 23, 2009

PGI 9.0 Compilers Simplify x64+GPU Programming

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The Portland Group shares roadmap for PGI Accelerator Fortran and C compiler products for GPU-enabled HPC systems

PORTLAND, Ore., June 23 -- The Portland Group, a wholly-owned subsidiary of STMicroelectronics, today announced the general availability of the PGI Release 9.0 line of high-performance parallelizing compilers and development tools for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. PGI Release 9.0 is the first general release to include support for the high-level PGI Accelerator programming model on x64 processor-based Linux systems incorporating NVIDIA CUDA-enabled GPUs.

The use of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) as general purpose accelerators has been a growing trend in high-performance computing (HPC). Until now, use of GPUs from Fortran applications has been extremely limited. Developers targeting GPU accelerators have had to program in C at a detailed level using sequences of function calls to manage movement of data between the x64 host and GPU, and to offload computations from the host to the GPU. The PGI Accelerator Fortran and C compilers automatically analyze whole program structure and data, split portions of an application between a multicore x64 CPU and a GPU as specified by user directives, and define and generate a mapping of loops to automatically use the parallel cores, hardware threading capabilities and SIMD vector capabilities of modern GPUs.

"PGI 9.0 opens up general-purpose programming on NVIDIA CUDA-enabled GPUs to science and engineering domain experts," said Douglas Miles, director of The Portland Group. "Programming models like CUDA and OpenCL enable expert programmers to write efficient GPU code by exposing low-level details of the hardware. The PGI Accelerator model enables any Fortran or C programmer to incrementally add GPU optimizations to a program using compiler directives similar to those used in OpenMP programming for multi-core CPUs."

The PGI Accelerator programming model is available now in the PGI Fortran and C compilers on Linux as an extended free preview for all PGI 9.0 licensees through the end of 2009. Additional PGI 9.0 new features include several Fortran 2003 incremental features, Intel Xeon EX (Nehalem) optimizations including support for SSE 4.1/4.2, Six-Core AMD Opteron (Istanbul) support and optimizations, full OpenMP 3.0 support in C++, an all-new graphical interface on the PGDBG OpenMP/MPI debugger, enhancements to the PGPROF performance profiling environment, and support for Fedora Core 10/11, SuSE 11.1 and Ubuntu 9.

PGI Accelerator compilers product line announced

The Portland Group has also unveiled plans for a new x64+GPU compiler and tools product line that will be first available in a release scheduled for Q4 2009. The PGI Workstation Accelerator product line features currently planned include:

PGI Accelerator Fortran and C compilers on Linux, MacOS and Windows.
Support for GPU device-resident data in the PGI Accelerator programming model.
Profiling of x64+GPU applications using the PGPROF profiler.
Expanded compiler feedback (CCFF) generation to guide application porting and optimization for x64+GPU targets.

An introduction to PGI Accelerator Fortran and C programming is available online at http://www.pgroup.com/lit/articles/insider/v1n1a1.htm. The PGI Accelerator v1.0 specification is online at http://www.pgroup.com/lit/whitepapers/pgi_accelerator.pdf. Evaluation copies of the new PGI 9.0 compilers are available from The Portland Group web site at www.pgroup.com. Registration is required.

About The Portland Group

The Portland Group, a wholly-owned subsidiary of STMicroelectronics, is the premier supplier of high-performance Fortran, C, and C++ compilers and tools for high-end computing systems and x64 and x86 processor-based workstations, servers, and clusters. PGI products are used widely by engineers, researchers and scientists in high-performance computing (HPC), the field of technical computing engaged in the modeling and simulation of complex processes, such as ocean modeling, weather forecasting, seismic analysis, bioinformatics and other areas. PGI compilers, which convert software programs into the binary instructions that computers understand, are recognized in the HPC community for delivering world-class performance across a wide spectrum of applications and benchmarks, and they are referenced regularly as the industry standard for performance and reliability. Further information on The Portland Group products can be found at www.pgroup.com, by calling Sales at (503) 682-2806, or by email to sales@pgroup.com.

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