PGI 9.0 Compilers Simplify x64+GPU Programming

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.

“PGI 9.0 opens up general-purpose programming on NVIDIA CUDA-enabled GPUs to science and engineering domain experts,” said Douglas Miles, director, The Portland Group. “Programming models like CUDA and OpenCL enable expert programmers to write efficient GPU code by exposing low-level details of the hardware. The PGI Accelerator model enables any Fortran or C programmer to incrementally add GPU optimizations to a program using compiler directives similar to those used in OpenMP programming for multi-core CPUs.”

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.