Date: 14/11/2009

PGI Release 2010 parallelizing compilers and development tools

The Portland Group has announced the release 2010 of the PGI line of parallelizing compilers and development tools for Linux, Mac OS X (including Snow Leopard) and Windows (including Windows 7) will be available on Tuesday, November 17. The PGI 2010 supports the PGI Accelerator Programming model v1.0 standard on x64 processor-based systems incorporating NVIDIA CUDA, 1-enabled Graphical Processing Units (GPUs).

The PGI Release 2010 also includes PGI CUDA Fortran, an explicit GPU programming model and application programming interface (API) that offers direct control of all aspects of programming NVIDIA GPUs.

The PGI Accelerator programming model is a collection of compiler directives used to specify regions of code in Fortran and C programs that can be offloaded from a host CPU to an attached accelerator to enhance performance. Applications optimized using the PGI Accelerator directives remain 100% portable to other compilers and platforms, and execute on systems with or without a GPU accelerator.

The key features of the PGI 2010 are,

Ability to define and leave data on the GPU across accelerator regions and subroutine boundaries
Support for COMPLEX and DOUBLE COMPLEX data types in Fortran
Support for C structs and Fortran derived types
Automatic GPU-side loop unrolling for improved performance
Support for Accelerator regions nested within OpenMP parallel regions

"Within five years, most HPC systems will include both x86 CPUs and accelerators in some form," said Douglas Miles, director, The Portland Group. "The PGI 2010 compilers will play a role in establishing accelerated computing as the mainstream HPC architecture."

PGI 2010 also includes a major update to the PGPROF performance profiler, supports performance profiling of binary executables without re-compiling or any special software privileges, uniform operation and features on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, support for PGI Accelerator and PGI CUDA Fortran GPU-side performance statistics, and an updated graphical user interface.

For more details visit www.pgroup.com