New PGI 9.0 Compilers Simplify x64+GPU Programming

June 24th, 2009

Yesterday The Portland Group announced the release of version 9.0 of its Fortran and C compilers with support for GPUs and x64 multi-core CPUs.  An introduction to PGI Accelerator Fortran and C programming is available online, as is the PGI Accelerator v1.0 specification. Evaluation copies of the new PGI 9.0 compilers are available from The Portland Group web site. Registration is required.

From the press release:

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 multi-core 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.

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.

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