PGI CDK Cluster Development Kit for Windows Now Available

PGI brings powerful suite of parallel compilers and programming tools to popular Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003: The Portland Group announced the general availability of its PGI CDK Cluster Development Kit for Microsoft Windows Computer Cluster Server 2003 (CCS). The PGI CDK for Windows is a suite of parallel Fortran, C, and C++ compilers and development tools specifically optimized for Windows CCS. PGI compilers and tools are used widely in high- performance computing (HPC), the field of technical computing engaged in the modeling and simulation of ocean modeling, weather forecasting, seismic analysis, crash simulation and other complex processes. Until now, the PGI CDK has been available only for Linux-based clusters based on 32-bit and 64-bit microprocessors from AMD and Intel. The Portland Group extends to these same platforms support for the Microsoft 64-bit Compute Cluster Server operating systems with this release. "With an accelerating trend towards platform diversification in the HPC market, PGI remains committed to providing HPC developers with the best performance on their choice of platform," said Douglas Miles, director, The Portland Group. "The HPC community has recognized PGI compilers for delivering world-class performance across a wide spectrum of applications and benchmarks running on workstations and servers based on both major x64 processors, and the introduction of PGI CDK for Windows CCS gives the HPC community another option for cluster programming." "We are excited to partner with PGI to deliver both world-class performance and ease-of-use for HPC clusters," said Shawn Hansen, director of HPC marketing division at Microsoft. "Now that PGI's market leading tools are available cross-platform, customers can accelerate their productivity by combining their tuned developer environments with the ease-of-use of the Windows HPC platform. The PGI CDK Cluster Development Kit includes the PGF77, PGF95, PGCC, and PGC++ compilers for the FORTRAN 77, Fortran 95, C, and C++ programming languages, respectively. All PGI compilers feature full native support for OpenMP parallel programming extensions in Fortran, C, and C++; full support for 64-bit addressing; native integrated scalar and vector SSE code generation; and a bundled version of the ACML, a highly optimized library of numeric functions for mathematical, engineering, scientific, and financial applications. In addition, PGI CDK includes PBDBG, an OpenMP and MPI parallel symbolic debugger and PGPROF, an OpenMP and MPI parallel graphical performance profiler. Both tools include support for MSMPI, the Windows implementation of the de facto standard Message Passing Interface commonly used for running programs in parallel on clusters. MSMPI is included with Windows CCS. PGDBG and PGPROF provide full-featured graphical user interfaces that are fully compatible with the Linux versions, creating an environment that is ideal for programmers porting applications from Linux to Windows. Included in the PGI CDK for Windows are network floating-license versions of PGI's compilers and tools designed to run under a number of different Windows programming environments including:
  • Native, under 64-bit or 32-bit Windows CCS, using a UNIX-like shell command interface that is compatible with UNIX/Linux environments, the traditional operating system of choice in the HPC field.
  • Windows Subsystem for UNIX-based applications (SUA). SUA is a source-code compatible subsystem for compiling and running UNIX-based applications on a computer running a Windows Server-class operating system including Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003.
  • Visual Studio 2005. Visual Studio is the preeminent graphical software development environment for Windows.

Complete information on the PGI CDK for Windows is available from The Portland Group web site at www.pgroup.com. All PGI products are highly optimized for both AMD64 and Intel 64 processors.