NVidia and PGI partner to bring CUDA to Fortran

While not really Visualization based, I can’t resist covering anything that has to do with CUDA, and NVidia has partnered with PGI to bring the dreams of hundreds of supercomputing programmers to reality.  PGI owns the popular Portland Group compilers and will be releasing, with help from NVidia, a new Fortran CUDA compiler soon.  Many HPC codes use fortran already and Fortran has a nice vector operator syntax that fits nicely with CUDA’s usage mechanics.

The new CUDA-enabled Fortran compilers are expected to be available November 2009. See the full press release after the break.

Hamburg, Germany, June 23,2009 – The Portland Group®, a wholly-owned subsidiary of STMicroelectronics and a leading supplier of compilers for high-performance computing (HPC), today announced an agreement with NVIDIA under which the two companies plan to develop new Fortran language support for CUDA GPUs.

The NVIDIA® CUDA™ architecture allows developers to 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.

“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 GPU computing developer community has made it clear there is a need and demand for a production-quality Fortran solution on the GPU,” said Andy Keane, general manager, Tesla GPU Computing Solutions, NVIDIA. “With their large base of Fortran developers for x64 processor-based HPC systems, PGI provides a perfect bridge for migration of production science and engineering codes from existing platforms to NVIDIA Tesla GPUs.”

The Portland Group and NVIDIA 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. More detailed information about PGI compilers and tools is available online at http://www.pgroup.com.

For more information on NVIDIA CUDA, please visit www.nvidia.com/cuda.

About The Portland Group
The Portland Group, a wholly-owned subsidiary of STMicroelectronics, is the premier supplier of high-performance Fortran, C, and C++ compilers and tools for high-end computing systems and x64 and x86 processor-based workstations, servers, and clusters. PGI® products are used widely by engineers, researchers and scientists in high-performance computing (HPC), the field of technical computing engaged in the modeling and simulation of complex processes, such as ocean modeling, weather forecasting, seismic analysis, bioinformatics and other areas. PGI compilers, which convert software programs into the binary instructions that computers understand, are recognized in the HPC community for delivering world-class performance across a wide spectrum of applications and benchmarks, and they are referenced regularly as the industry standard for performance and reliability.

Further information on The Portland Group products can be found at www.pgroup.com, by calling Sales at (503) 682-2806, or by email to [email protected].