The Portland Group has announced an agreement with NVIDIA under which the two companies plan to develop new Fortran language support for CUDA GPUs. The pair will release the Fortran language specification for CUDA GPUs at the International Conference on Supercomputing in Hamburg, Germany this week. The CUDA Fortran compiler will be added to a production release of the PGI Fortran compilers scheduled for availability in November 2009.
"Fortran support for CUDA GPUs is a perfect complement to our existing roadmap for the PGI Accelerator Fortran and C compilers," said Douglas Miles, director, The Portland Group. "It enables interoperability of PGI Fortran and CUDA C and gives PGI users a full range of options in porting and optimizing Fortran applications to leverage the power of CUDA-enabled NVIDIA GPUs."
The NVIDIA CUDA architecture lets developers offload computationally intensive kernels to the massively parallel GPU. Through function calls and language extensions, CUDA gives developers explicit control over the mapping of general-purpose computational kernels to GPUs as well as placement and movement of data between the x64 processor and the GPU. The NVIDIA CUDA C compiler already provides this capability to C programmers. The CUDA Fortran compiler will provide this same level of control and optimization in a native Fortran environment from PGI.
