Date: 20/07/2010

PGI compilers and tools for Visual Studio 2010

The Portland Group, a subsidiary of STMicroelectronics has made available the PGI Visual Fortran (PVF) for Visual Studio 2010. PVF integrates PGI parallel Fortran compilers and tools with Microsoft Visual Studio to offer a high-productivity development solution to scientists and engineers upgrading to the latest 64-bit multi-core platforms running Microsoft Windows.

PGI compilers and tools are used on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows systems based on multi-core CPUs from Intel and AMD and incorporating GPU accelerators from NVIDIA. The new 10.6 version of the PGI 2010 release adds support for building Windows Fortran applications using the latest version of the popular Microsoft Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE)-Visual Studio 2010. PVF tools and technologies, including an MPI/OpenMP parallel debugger, enable Visual Studio developers to develop High Performance Computing (HPC) applications for multi-core workstations and Windows HPC Server 2008 clusters. The PVF is available with support for programming NIVDIA GPU accelerators using directive-based PGI Accelerator Fortran or CUDA Fortran language extensions.

"With this latest release of PVF, PGI Fortran compilers and tools for multi-core processors and GPUs are available through Visual Studio 2010 to the large base of scientists and engineers developing for Windows," said Douglas Miles, director, The Portland Group. "PVF's world-class performance and state-of-the art compiler technologies allow developers to leverage the wide array of new microprocessor and accelerator innovations coming out of Intel, AMD and NVIDIA together with the productivity advantages of Microsoft HPC technologies."

The PVF include:
1. Native Fortran 95/2003 Visual Studio project system.
2. Fortran text editor extensions, intrinsic function tips and keyword completion.
3. Integrated PGI-custom Fortran-capable debugger for debugging of single-thread, multi-thread and OpenMP parallel applications and MSMPI parallel applications running locally and on clusters.
4. Microsoft Visual C++ interoperability and full support for Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2005.
5. Optional support for the Visual Numerics IMSL Fortran Numerical Library and the Intel MKL Math Kernel Library.

PGI Visual Fortran also supports GPU accelerators. The PGI Accelerator programming model is a high-level implicit model similar to OpenMP for multi-core x64 systems. Using compiler directives, programmers can offload compute-intensive code regions from a host CPU to a GPU accelerator. Programs containing PGI Accelerator directives remain 100% standard-compliant and portable. PVF also supports CUDA Fortran language extensions. Defined in cooperation with NVIDIA, CUDA Fortran is an analog to the NVIDIA CUDA C compiler and gives expert programmers direct control of all aspects of GPGPU programming.

PVF includes PGI Unified Binary technology thus enabling generation of a single executable file containing code sequences optimized for multiple processors from AMD, Intel and NVIDIA. PGI Unified Binary technology enables Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and custom applications developers to take advantage of the latest processor innovations while treating x64 and x64+GPU as a single platform.

Price:
A single user academic license with GPU support is US$249.
Commercial licenses start at US$599 and US$899 with GPU support.

Availability: PVF is distributed by electronic download and is available now.

For more information visit: www.st.com.