DEVELOPER TOOLS

PORTLAND, Ore. -- First production release of PGI Workstation 5.0 compilers and tools optimized for 32-bit x86 and 64-bit AMD Opteron processor-based workstations and servers is now available - The Portland Group Compiler Technology team of STMicroelectronics today announced the general availability of the PGI(R) Workstation 5.0 Fortran and C compilers for workstations and servers based on 32-bit x86 or 64-bit AMD Opteron processors. This is the first production release of STMicroelectronics' suite of optimizing software development tools that targets AMD64 technology processors announced in April 2003. The suite is designed to run high-performance computing applications for complex modeling and simulations in weather forecasting, geophysical processing, aerodynamic simulation and related fields. The PGI Workstation 5.0 release includes the PGF77(R), PGF90(R), PGCC(R), and PGC++(TM) compilers. The PGI compilers and tools are now highly optimized for both 64-bit AMD Opteron processors and 32-bit x86 processors. Performance improvements provided by PGI Workstation 5.0 average 34% over PGI Workstation 4.1 on several industry-standard benchmarks on 32-bit x86 processor-based systems. The PGI Workstation 5.0 compilers also take advantage of the expanded register sets and processor features of the AMD Opteron processor-based platform to enable more efficient execution of compute-intensive applications. The same suite of industry-standard benchmarks improves an additional 10% when re-compiled to take advantage of features unique to 64-bit AMD Opteron processors. "PGI Workstation 5.0 is important to the science and engineering community for several reasons," said Douglas Miles, director of Portland Laboratory, Advanced Systems Technology, STMicroelectronics. "We have further tuned our compilers and tools for all x86 processor-based platforms, so that users can obtain uniformly high performance regardless of which 32-bit x86 processors they use. In addition, the added support for AMD64 technology has generated intense interest in the science and engineering market. Over 350 of our customer sites have chosen to upgrade to the new 64-bit AMD Opteron processor compilers and tools prior to the formal release of this product." "PGI and AMD have been collaborating for over a year to bring the power of 64-bit computing to science and engineering customers that already have huge investments in 32-bit x86 applications," said Ben Williams, director of AMD's Server/Workstation Business Segment. "PGI Workstation 5.0 allows those customers to easily build and run high-performance applications on either a 32- or 64-bit operating system, protecting their existing investments in application and technology infrastructure." PGI Workstation 5.0 also includes the enhanced PGDBG(R) parallel application debugger and PGPROF(R) parallel application performance profiler. PGDBG now offers improved load times and event handling on large applications, improved thread handling, source-level debugging of code from shared libraries, and examination of MPI message queues. The release 5.0 versions of PGDBG and PGPROF also support the new architectural features of AMD Opteron processor-based systems, including full parallel debugging capabilities on multi-processor workstations and servers.