HPCwire: PGI Fortran, C Compilers Supporting OpenACC Now Available

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June 19, 2012

PGI Fortran, C Compilers Supporting OpenACC Now Available

HAMBURG, Germany, June 19 -- The Portland Group, a wholly-owned subsidiary of STMicroelectronics and a leading supplier of compilers and tools for high-performance computing (HPC), announced immediate availability of its PGI Accelerator Fortran and C compilers with support for the new OpenACC 1.0 specification for directive-based programming of GPUs and accelerators that allows programmers to provide hints or guidance in their programs.

“PGI continues to make accelerator programming more straight forward and productive for domain experts in science and engineering,” said Douglas Miles, Director of The Portland Group. “The OpenACC standard dovetails perfectly into our existing compiler products as a subset of the PGI Accelerator programming model. The PGI Accelerator compilers for Fortran 2003 and C include support for both high-level directive-based x64+GPU programming and explicit GPU programming using CUDA C/C++/Fortran language extensions.”

The OpenACC standard, unveiled at the SC11 conference in November, 2011, as founded by PGI, Cray, and NVIDIA, with support from CAPS, is fully compatible and interoperable with the NVIDIA^® CUDA^® parallel programming architecture. The OpenACC 1.0 specification was developed cooperatively by the founding members and is based in large part on the PGI Accelerator programming model. The OpenACC Application Program Interface (API) describes a collection of compiler directives to specify loops and regions of code in standard C, C++ and Fortran to be offloaded from a host CPU to an attached accelerator, providing portability across operating systems, host CPUs and accelerators. By using directives, developers can have a single code base that is multi-platform and multi-vendor compatible, a key advantage for cross-platform and multi-generation application development.

Using OpenACC, parallel programmers can offload code from a host CPU to an attached accelerator by using hints, known as directives, to identify areas of code suitable for acceleration. In addition to exposing parallelizing opportunities to the compiler, directives can also be used to specify the details of how to efficiently map loops to a particular accelerator and how to optimize data movement. Directives free the developer to focus on algorithms and application functionality while the compiler does the detailed work of offloading computations onto an accelerator. The principle benefit of directives is significant improvements to application performance without requiring modification to the underlying source code.

PGI Accelerator Compilers with OpenACC Support

First announced in 2008, the PGI Accelerator compilers augment the OpenACC standard in several areas to provide enhanced functionality and flexibility including:

· Auto-generation of optimized loop schedules.

· Automatic use of shared memory.

· Automatic sum reductions.

· Interoperability with CUDA Fortran and CUDA C/C++.

· PGI Unified Binary™ technology executable files that work in the presence or absence of an accelerator.

In addition, PGI Accelerator compilers include PGI’s complete suite of x86 host-performance optimization technologies including automatic SIMD vectorization, auto-parallelization, interprocedural analysis, function inlining and more.

Currently, PGI Accelerator Fortran and C99 compilers support x64+NVIDIA systems running under Linux, OS X and Windows; the compilers are supported on all Intel and AMD x64 processor-based systems with CUDA-enabled NVIDIA GPUs. OpenACC support will be included in PGI Release 2012 version 12.6 and later. It is available free of charge to PGI Accelerator licensees with a current PGI subscription. A free trial version is available from the PGI website atwww.pgroup.com/support/trial.htm. More information on the PGI Accelerator compilers with OpenACC is available at http://www.pgroup.com/accelerate. More information on the OpenACC API and standard can be found at www.openacc.org.

About The Portland Group (PGI)

The Portland Group, a wholly-owned subsidiary of STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM), is the premier supplier of high-performance parallel Fortran, C, and C++ compilers and tools for workstations, servers, and clusters based on x64 processors from Intel and AMD, and GPU accelerators from NVIDIA. Further information on The Portland Group products can be obtained at www.pgroup.com, by calling Sales at (503) 682-2806, or by email to sales@pgroup.com.

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Source: The Portland Group

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