The Portland Group Announces PGI Visual Fortran Preview Edition

CGIDir
Friday, June 9, 2006; 03:48 AM

The Portland Group announced a technology preview edition of PGI Visual Fortran(PVF). The PVF Preview Edition fully integrates the PGI suite of high-performance parallelizing 64-bit Fortran compilers and tools with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to offer a high-productivity development solution to scientists and engineers upgrading from 32-bit to 64-bit Microsoft Windows platforms. PVF is also integrated with the Microsoft Platform Software Developer's Kit (SDK) and the current Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) library.

PGI compilers and tools are widely used by engineers and scientists on 32-bit and 64-bit Linux workstations, servers and clusters based on high-performance microprocessors from AMD and Intel. With this preview release, The Portland Group extends to these same processors support for building 64-bit Fortran applications for Windows using the popular Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 integrated development environment (IDE). PGI Visual Fortran incorporates compatibility features that simplify upgrading from legacy 32-bit Fortran for Windows to 64-bit platforms, including support for Windows 32-bit application programming interfaces (APIs), calling conventions, directives and de facto standard utilities libraries.

"PVF is a key component of a broader PGI strategy to enable comprehensive cross-platform development and tuning of performance-critical applications," said Douglas Miles, director, The Portland Group. "Our existing PGI Workstation and PGI Server product lines are the ideal solutions for developers upgrading platforms or maintaining large, complex, performance-critical applications across multiple platforms. PVF adds to the existing line a version of the PGI Fortran compilers deeply integrated with Visual Studio 2005, compatible with Windows Server 2003 x64 editions, delivering the proven ease-of-use and productivity benefits of this environment to Fortran developers looking to upgrade from 32-bit Windows or develop new parallel applications targeted for Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003."

Developing applications for Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 allows developers to leverage their existing Windows-based skills and experience. Microsoft Visual Studio is the most widely used integrated development environment in the world, and Visual Studio 2005 includes a parallel debugger used when developing HPC applications.

"The integration of PGI Visual Fortran with Visual Studio 2005 combines the benefits of Microsoft's familiar development environment with PGI's powerful and flexible parallel programming tools to accelerate the development of high-performance applications targeted for Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003," said John Borozan, group product manager, Windows Server Division at Microsoft Corp.

PGI Visual Fortran includes the latest version of PGI's native OpenMP and auto-parallelizing compilers for the FORTRAN 77 and Fortran 95 programming languages. Key features of PVF include: a customized Fortran-aware text editor for Visual Studio 2005 , Fortran intrinsics tips, Fortran keyword completion, a custom build engine for Fortran applications, a custom debug engine that provides the language-specific debugging capability required for Fortran; support for debugging of single-thread, multi-thread and OpenMP parallel applications, Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 interoperability, support for debugging of mixed PGI Fortran and Visual C++ 2005 applications and a powerful interactive parallel performance analyzer.

All PGI compilers and tools feature full native support for OpenMP parallel programming extensions, auto-parallelization for multi-core processors, full support for 64-bit addressing; native integrated scalar and vector SSE/SSE2/SSE3 code generation, PGI's world-class optimization infrastructure, and a bundled version of AMD's ACML, a library of highly optimized numeric functions for mathematical, engineering, scientific and financial applications.

PGI Visual Fortran is highly optimized for both 32-bit and 64-bit AMD64 and EM64T processors and is unique in its ability to build a single PGI Unified Binary containing code sequences optimized for both AMD64 and EM64T processors. The PGI Unified Binary enables Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and custom applications developers to build one binary version of their applications that can be delivered and used effectively on either AMD64 or EM64T processors.

Complete information on the preview edition of PGI Visual Fortran is available from The Portland Group web site at http://www.pgroup.com.