PGI (formerly The Portland Group, Inc.) was a company that produced a set of commercially available Fortran, C and C++ compilers for high-performance computing systems. On July 29, 2013, Nvidia acquired The Portland Group, Inc."NVIDIA Pushes Further Into High Performance Computing With Portland Group Acquisition"
NVIDIA. July 29, 2013 As of August 5, 2020, the "

PGI Compilers and Tools PGI may refer to: * Protected geographical indication, one of the three protected denominations for agricultural products of the European Union * Parking guidance and information, signs and other indicators to assist in parking a car * Phosphogluco ...

" technology is a part of the Nvidia HPC SDK product available as a free download from Nvidia.

Company history

The Portland Group was founded as a privately held company in 1989, using compiler technology developed at and acquired from Floating Point Systems Inc. The first products, pipelining Fortran and C compilers, were released in 1991, targeting the Intel i860 processor. These compilers were used on Intel supercomputers like the iPSC/860, the

Touchstone Delta The Intel Paragon is a discontinued series of massively parallel supercomputers that was produced by Intel in the 1990s. The Paragon XP/S is a productized version of the experimental ''Touchstone Delta'' system that was built at Caltech, launched ...

, and the Paragon, and were the compilers of choice for the majority of i860-based platforms. In the early 1990s, PGI was deeply involved in the development of High Performance Fortran, or HPF, a data parallel language extension to Fortran 90 which provides a portable programming interface for a wide variety of architectures. PGI produced an HPF compiler, called PGHPF, until its last release, version 15.10, on October 28, 2015. In 1996, PGI developed x86 compilers for the

ASCI Red ASCI Red (also known as ASCI Option Red or TFLOPS) was the first computer built under the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative ( ASCI), the supercomputing initiative of the United States government created to help the maintenance of the ...

Supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratories, the first computer system to sustain teraflop performance. In 1997, PGI released x86 compilers for general use on Linux workstations. The Portland Group was acquired by

STMicroelectronics STMicroelectronics N.V. commonly referred as ST or STMicro is a Dutch multinational corporation and technology company of French-Italian origin headquartered in Plan-les-Ouates near Geneva, Switzerland and listed on the French stock market. ST ...

on December 19, 2000. During

ownership, PGI operated as a wholly owned subsidiary producing high-performance computing (HPC) compilers and tools for Linux, Windows, Mac OS, and

ST100 series of embedded DSP cores. PGI has been deeply involved in the expansion of the use of GPGPUs for high-performance computing, developing

CUDA Fortran CUDA (or Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for general purpose processing, an approach ca ...

with Nvidia and PGI Accelerator Fortran and C compilers which use programming directives. PGI and NVIDIA have both participated in the specification of the new standard OpenACC directives for GPU computing since it was first announced on November 3, 2011. On May 21, 2013, PGI released a compiler for the OpenCL language on multi-core ARM processors. Nvidia acquired PGI from

on July 29, 2013 and offered the PGI technology under the "

" product line. On August 5, 2020, Nvidia announced that the "

" product line has evolved into a new NVIDIA HPC SDK product available as a free download from Nvidia. The Nvidia HPC SDK includes rebranded PGI compilers and added features for developing HPC applications.

Product and market history

Compilers

PGI compilers incorporate global optimization, vectorization, software pipelining, and shared-memory parallelization capabilities targeting both Intel and AMD processors. PGI supports the following high-level languages: * Fortran 77 * Fortran 90/95/2003 * Fortran 2008 (partial) * High Performance Fortran (HPF) * ANSI C99 with K&R extensions * ANSI/ISO C++ * CUDA Fortran * OpenCL * OpenACC * OpenMP Below is a list of the PGI compilers that have been rebranded and integrated into the Nvidia HPC SDK: * Fortran: nvfortran (formerly pgfortran) * C: nvc (formerly pgcc) * C++: nvc++ (formerly pgc++)

Programming tools

PGI also provided a parallel debugger, PGDBG, and a performance profiler, PGPROF, both of which supported OpenMP and MPI parallelism on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS. On Windows, the PGI Fortran compiler and debugger was fully integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio as a product called PGI Visual Fortran (PVF). Mac OS support and the PVF product were discontinued after the release of PGI version 19.10 on November 6, 2019. Below is a list of PGI programming tools that have been retired and replaced by other Nvidia programming tools in the Nvidia HPC SDK: * Debugger: PGDBG (replaced with cuda-gdb) * Profiler: PGPROF (replaced with Nsight)

PGI milestones

* 1989 – PGI founded * 1991 – Pipelining i860 Compilers * 1994 – Parallel i860 Compilers * 1996 –

TFLOPS Compilers * 1997 – Linux/x86 Compilers * 1998 – OpenMP for Linux/x86 * 1999 – SSE/ SIMD Vectorization * 1999 - PGI CDK Cluster Development Kit * 2000 -

acquires PGI * 2001 – VLIW ST100 Compilers * 2003 – 64-bit Linux/x86 Compilers * 2004 – ASCI Red Storm Compilers * 2005 – PGI Unified Binary Technology * 2006 – PGI Visual Fortran * 2007 – 64-bit Mac OS Compilers * 2008 – PGI Accelerator Compilers * 2009 – CUDA Fortran Compiler * 2010 – CUDA X86 Compiler * 2011 –

AVX AVX may refer to: Technology * Advanced Vector Extensions, an instruction set extension in the x86 microprocessor architecture ** AVX2, an expansion of the AVX instruction set ** AVX-512, 512-bit extensions to the 256-bit AVX * AVX Corporation, a m ...

/ FMA Vectorization * 2012 – OpenACC standard directives for GPU computing * 2013 – PGI OpenCL compiler for Multi-core ARM CPUs. Removed after Nvidia bought PGI. * 2013 - Nvidia acquires PGI from

. Nvidia offers the PGI technology under a "

" product line. * 2015 - Flang, an open source Fortran Front-End for LLVM, is released. * 2018 - Development of a new Flang Fortran Front-End, based on the Fortran 2018 standard, begins. * 2020 - Nvidia integrates the PGI technology into a new NVIDIA HPC SDK product. Nvidia retires the "

" brand name.

References

External links

*
NVIDIA HPC SDK website

OpenACC website

PGI Visual Fortran in the Visual Studio Gallery

OpenCL website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Portland Group Compilers C (programming language) compilers C++ compilers Fortran compilers Debuggers Profilers Integrated development environments