The Portland Group, a wholly-owned subsidiary of STMicroelectronics and a supplier of compilers for high-performance computing (HPC), announced availability of a Beta release of the PGI Accelerator Fortran, C and C++ compilers with support for the OpenACC API targeting AMD Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) and discrete Graphics Processing Units (dGPUs).
“One of PGI’s goals is to increase productivity and provide performance portability for applications developed and maintained by science and engineering domain experts,” said Douglas Miles, Director of The Portland Group. “The OpenACC standard was developed in direct response to the HPC community’s interest for a vendor-neutral, platform-independent, directive-based accelerator programming model. Adding PGI Accelerator support for AMD APUs and GPUs is the latest step in the evolution of OpenACC and compiler technology for heterogeneous parallel computing at PGI.”
The OpenACC Application Programming Interface (API) describes a collection of compiler directives to specify loops and regions of code in standard C, C++ and Fortran. These regions can be offloaded from a host CPU to an attached accelerator, providing portability across operating systems, host CPUs and accelerators. By exposing parallelism to the compiler, directives allow the compiler to do the detailed work of mapping the computation onto the accelerator to deliver significant improvements to application performance. Using directives, developers can have a single code base that is multi-platform and multi-vendor compatible, a key advantage for multi-platform and multi-generation application development.
