Portland-based Portland Group has released its 2012 PGI line of high-performance parallelizing compilers and development tools for Linux, OS X, and Windows. The release is noted by its new support for the OpenACC directive-based programming model for NVIDIA CUDA-enabled Graphics Processing Units (GPUs).
This release is also the first to include the fully feature-enabled PGI CUDA C/C++ compiler for multi-core x64 CPUs from Intel and AMD. In addition, PGI 2012 includes a number of performance and feature enhancements for multi-core x64 processor-based HPC systems.
"GPU accelerators are now a mainstay in HPC with NVIDIA's CUDA achieving the widest adoption so far", said Douglas Miles, director of The Portland Group. "First announced in 2008, the PGI Accelerator Fortran and C compilers provide a directive-based high-level approach to GPU programming. Targeting scientists and engineers who are not full-time programmers, the PGI Accelerator programming model frees developers from the tedious aspects of GPU programming and lets them focus instead on optimizing their algorithms."
Other benefits compared to low-level GPU programming models include enhanced productivity (Portland group claims that many developers see performance gains in just minutes) and improved source code portability achieved by retaining compatibility across GPUs and CPUs. PGI 2012 fully supports the PGI Accelerator 1.3 specification including asynchronous data transfer and kernel launch directives and enhanced data management capabilities.
Based in large part on the PGI Accelerator programming model, the OpenACC API provides a hardware-independent methodology for programming accelerators, coprocessors, and related offload engines. Currently, PGI is conducting a closed evaluation of its first Fortran and C compilers to include support for a subset of the OpenACC 1.0 specification. PGI expects to ship fully OpenACC version 1.0 conformant compilers by mid-year 2012.
Other features and enhancements in PGI 2012 include expanded support for the new Advanced Vector Extensions to the x64 instruction set architecture (AVX) in the latest Intel Sandy Bridge and AMD Bulldozer CPUs, improved auto-parallelization support, support for recursive I/O (part of the Fortran 2003 language standard), a new GNU compatible C++ compiler with all PGI features and optimizations, OpenMP nested parallelism, remote cluster debugging support, and Eclipse integration of the PGI C/C++ compilers on Linux.
PGI 2012 supports the latest operating system releases including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2, Fedora 16, SLES 11 SP1, Ubuntu 11.10, and Apple OS X Lion.
