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PGI (formerly The Portland Group, Inc.) was a company that produced a set of commercially available Fortran, C and C++
compilers In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs tha ...
for
high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) is the use of supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into ...
systems. On July 29, 2013,
Nvidia Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...
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" 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 Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...
supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...
s like the iPSC/860, the Touchstone Delta, 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 Supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratories, the first computer system to sustain teraflop performance. In 1997, PGI released x86 compilers for general use on
Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
workstations. The Portland Group was acquired by STMicroelectronics on December 19, 2000. During STMicroelectronics ownership, PGI operated as a wholly owned subsidiary producing high-performance computing (HPC) compilers and tools for Linux, Windows, Mac OS, and STMicroelectronics ST100 series of embedded DSP cores. PGI has been deeply involved in the expansion of the use of
GPGPU General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU, or less often GPGP) is the use of a graphics processing unit (GPU), which typically handles computation only for computer graphics, to perform computation in applications traditiona ...
s for high-performance computing, developing CUDA Fortran with
Nvidia Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...
and PGI Accelerator Fortran and C compilers which use programming directives. PGI and
NVIDIA Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...
have both participated in the specification of the new standard
OpenACC OpenACC (for ''open accelerators'') is a programming standard for parallel computing developed by Cray, CAPS, Nvidia and PGI. The standard is designed to simplify parallel programming of heterogeneous CPU/ GPU systems. As in OpenMP, the prog ...
directives for GPU computing since it was first announced on November 3, 2011. On May 21, 2013, PGI released a compiler for the
OpenCL OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a software framework, framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous computing, heterogeneous platforms consisting of central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), di ...
language on multi-core ARM processors. Nvidia acquired PGI from STMicroelectronics on July 29, 2013 and offered the PGI technology under the "PGI Compilers and Tools" product line. On August 5, 2020, Nvidia announced that the "PGI Compilers and Tools" 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 The American National Standards Institute (ANSI ) is a private nonprofit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organiz ...
C99 with K&R extensions * ANSI/ISO C++ *
CUDA In computing, CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a proprietary parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for accelerated gene ...
Fortran *
OpenCL OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a software framework, framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous computing, heterogeneous platforms consisting of central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), di ...
*
OpenACC OpenACC (for ''open accelerators'') is a programming standard for parallel computing developed by Cray, CAPS, Nvidia and PGI. The standard is designed to simplify parallel programming of heterogeneous CPU/ GPU systems. As in OpenMP, the prog ...
* 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 Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...
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 Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...
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 – ASCI Red TFLOPS Compilers * 1997 – Linux/x86 Compilers * 1998 – OpenMP for Linux/x86 * 1999 – SSE/
SIMD Single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) is a type of parallel computer, parallel processing in Flynn's taxonomy. SIMD describes computers with multiple processing elements that perform the same operation on multiple data points simultaneousl ...
Vectorization * 1999 - PGI CDK Cluster Development Kit * 2000 - STMicroelectronics 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 In computing, CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a proprietary parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for accelerated gene ...
Fortran Compiler * 2010 – CUDA X86 Compiler * 2011 – AVX/ FMA Vectorization * 2012 –
OpenACC OpenACC (for ''open accelerators'') is a programming standard for parallel computing developed by Cray, CAPS, Nvidia and PGI. The standard is designed to simplify parallel programming of heterogeneous CPU/ GPU systems. As in OpenMP, the prog ...
standard directives for GPU computing * 2013 – PGI
OpenCL OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a software framework, framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous computing, heterogeneous platforms consisting of central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), di ...
compiler for Multi-core ARM CPUs. Removed after
Nvidia Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...
bought PGI. * 2013 - Nvidia acquires PGI from STMicroelectronics. Nvidia offers the PGI technology under a "PGI Compilers and Tools" product line. * 2015 - Flang, an open source Fortran Front-End for
LLVM LLVM, also called LLVM Core, is a target-independent optimizer and code generator. It can be used to develop a Compiler#Front end, frontend for any programming language and a Compiler#Back end, backend for any instruction set architecture. LLVM i ...
, 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 "PGI Compilers and Tools" brand name.


See also

* Fortran * C * C++ *
Debugger A debugger is a computer program used to test and debug other programs (the "target" programs). Common features of debuggers include the ability to run or halt the target program using breakpoints, step through code line by line, and display ...
* Profiler * IDE


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 Defunct software companies of the United States 2000 mergers and acquisitions 2013 mergers and acquisitions