The Portland Group Releases PGI Visual Fortran for Visual Studio 2010

By DE Editors

The Portland Group (PGI) has announced the general availability of PGI Visual Fortran (PVF) for Visual Studio 2010. PVF integrates PGI parallel Fortran compilers and tools with Microsoft Visual Studio to offer a high-productivity development solution to scientists and engineers upgrading to the latest 64-bit multi-core platforms running Microsoft Windows.

PGI compilers and tools are used by programmers on Linux,  Mac OS X and Windows systems based on multi-core CPUs from Intel and AMD and incorporating GPU accelerators from NVIDIA. The new 10.6 version of the PGI 2010 release adds support for building Windows Fortran applications using the latest version of Microsoft Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE)—Visual Studio 2010. PVF tools and technologies, including an MPI/OpenMP parallel debugger, enable Visual Studio developers to efficiently develop high performance computing (HPC) applications for multi-core workstations and Windows HPC Server 2008 clusters.  In addition, PGI Visual Fortran is available with support for programming NIVDIA GPU accelerators using directive-based PGI Accelerator Fortran or CUDA Fortran language extensions.

“With this latest release of PVF, PGI Fortran compilers and tools for multi-core processors and GPUs are available through Visual Studio 2010 to the large base of scientists and engineers developing for Windows,” says Douglas Miles, director, The Portland Group. “PVF’s world-class performance and state-of-the art compiler technologies allow developers to leverage the wide array of new microprocessor and accelerator innovations coming out of Intel, AMD and NVIDIA together with the productivity advantages of Microsoft HPC technologies.”

PGI Visual Fortran is based on PGI’s native OpenMP and auto-parallelizing compiler for the Fortran 95/2003 programming languages.

PVF includes PGI Unified Binary technology—the ability to generate a single executable file containing code sequences optimized for multiple processors from AMD, Intel and NVIDIA. PGI Unified Binary technology enables independent software vendors (ISVs) and custom applications developers to take advantage of the latest processor innovations while treating x64 and x64+GPU as a single platform, maximizing flexibility and eliminating the need to target and optimize for separate processors.

A single user academic license with GPU support is $249. Commercial licenses start at $599 and $899 with GPU support. PVF is also available in multi-user network floating license configurations. A 15 day free trial of PVF is available from The Portland Group.

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