Date: 22/11/2008

Portland Group and AMD to jointly develop accelerator compiler technology

ST Micro's subsidiary Portland Group (PGI) has entered into an agreement with AMD to cooperate on the development of compiler technology for AMD FireStream compute accelerators. As part of the agreement, PGI and AMD will investigate and develop technology to enable PGI Fortran and C compilers to generate code directly for AMD FireStream boards and to generate heterogeneous x64+GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) executables that enable automatic utilization of AMD FireStream products if present in a system.

The Portland Group recently delivered a technology preview of the industry's first standard Fortran and C compilers that automatically offload computations from an x64 host program to a GPU. Until now, C and C++ developers targeting GPU accelerators have had to rely on language extensions or library-based solutions, and use of GPUs from Fortran applications has been extremely limited. The PGI x64+GPU programming model enables programmers to accelerate applications simply by adding portable compiler directives, treated as comments by other compilers, to existing standard-compliant Fortran and C programs and recompiling with appropriate compiler options. This gives individual developers the power to incrementally use accelerator technology where appropriate in large existing applications, eliminating the need for expensive and difficult corporate-level platform migration or acquisition decisions.

Key advantages of PGI compilers and tools can be found on The Portland Group web site at www.pgroup.com/about/why_PGI.htm.
A free 15-day evaluation of PGI Workstation compilers and tools is available for download at www.pgroup.com/support/downloads.php. Registration is required.