The Portland Group Announces its CUDA C/C++ Compiler for Multi-core x86

By DE Editors

The Portland Group has announced that a PGI CUDA C/C++ compiler for multi-core x86 platforms (CUDA-x86) will ship with its PGI 2012 release due out in January 2012.
CUDA is NVIDIA’s parallel computing architecture that works with NVIDIA GPUs.

Originally announced at the 2010 NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference (GTC), CUDA-x86 extends CUDA beyond the GPU into a system-wide programming model. The release of CUDA-x86 is a step toward making the x86+GPU architecture an integrated parallel platform.

The PGI compiler for CUDA-x86 processes CUDA C/C++as a native parallel-programming language for general-purpose multi-core x86 microprocessors from AMD and Intel. CUDA-x86 includes full support for NVIDIA’s CUDA C/C++ language for GPUs, so programmers can recompile CUDA application source code for execution on an x86 host.

Using CUDA-x86 developers can compile and optimize their CUDA applications to run on x86-based workstations, servers and clusters with or without an NVIDIA GPU accelerator. CUDA C/C++ applications compiled for x86 targets use multiple cores and the streaming SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) capabilities of Intel and AMD CPUs for parallel execution.

In addition, PGI CUDA C/C++ for GPU devices is planned for release in mid-2012. At that time, using PGI Unified Binary technology, one binary will be able to use NVIDIA GPUs when present or default to using multi-core x86 if no GPU is present, according to the company.

For more information, visit The Portland Group.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.