The Portland Group

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The Portland Group, Inc.
Wholly owned subsidiary
Industry Software, Programming tools
Founded Wilsonville, OR, United States (1989)
Founder Vince Schuster
Larry Meadows
Bob Toelle
Glenn Denison
Headquarters Lake Oswego, Oregon, United States
Area served
Worldwide
Products Compilers
Debuggers
Profilers
IDEs
Website Pgroup.com

The Portland Group, Inc. or PGI 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 Corporation acquired The Portland Group, Inc. [1] The Portland Group (or PGI) name is now known as a brand of software development tools produced by NVIDIA Corporation.

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, 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 which continues to be available today.

In 1996 PGI developed x86 compilers for the ASCI Red Supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratories,[2] 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 in December, 2000,[3] and operated as a wholly owned subsidiary producing HPC compilers and tools for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS. NVIDIA Corporation acquired PGI from STMicroelectronics on July 29, 2013.[4] Today, the same compilers and tools are made available through NVIDIA under "The Portland Group Compilers and Tools" brand name.[5]

PGI has been deeply involved in the expansion of the use of GPGPUs for high-performance computing, developing CUDA Fortran [6] [7] with NVIDIA Corporation and PGI Accelerator Fortran and C compilers [8] which use programming directives. PGI has more recently participated in the specification of the new standard OpenACC directives for GPU computing, and has released a compiler for the OpenCL language on multi-core ARM processors.

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

Programming Tools

PGI also provides a parallel debugger, PGDBG, and a performance profiler, PGPROF, both of which support OpenMP and MPI parallelism on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS. On Windows, the PGI Fortran compiler and debugger have been fully integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio as a product called PGI Visual Fortran.

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 Vectorization
  • 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[9]
  • 2010 - CUDA X86 Compiler
  • 2011 - AVX/FMA Vectorization
  • 2012 - OpenACC standard directives for GPU computing
  • 2012 - PGI OpenCL compiler for Multi-core ARM CPUs. Removed after NVIDIA bought PGI.

See also

References

  1. "Nvidia buys Portland Group for compiler smarts"
  2. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. "NVIDIA Pushes Further Into High Performance Computing With Portland Group Acquisition". NVIDIA. July 29, 2013.
  5. Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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External links