The latest release in the PGI line of high-performance parallelising compilers and development tools for Linux, OS X and Windows has been announced by The Portland Group, a wholly-owned subsidiary of STMicroelectronics. PGI 2012 is the first general release to include 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, it includes a number of performance and feature enhancements for multi-core x64 processor-based HPC systems.
PGI 2012 offers full support for the PGI Accelerator 1.3 specification, including asynchronous data transfer and kernel launch directives, and enhanced data management capabilities. Support for the OpenACC Application Programming Interface (API), announced by Nvidia, Cray, CAPs and PGI in November 2011, has also been introduced. The OpenACC API is an industry-wide effort to standardise accelerator programming based on compiler directives. PGI is currently conducting a closed evaluation of its first Fortran and C compilers to include support for a subset of the OpenACC 1.0 specification and 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-parallelisation support, a new GNU compatible C++ compiler with all PGI features and optimisations, and remote cluster debugging support and Eclipse integration of the PGI C/C++ compilers on Linux. PGI 2012 supports Cuda 4.1 as well as 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.
