Area served Worldwide Founded 1989 | Website pgroup.com | |
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Type Wholly owned subsidiary Headquarters Lake Oswego, Oregon, United States Products CompilersDebuggersProfilersIDEs Founders Bob Toelle, Glenn Denison, Vince Schuster, Larry Meadows Profiles | ||
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. The Portland Group (or PGI) name is now known as a brand of software development tools produced by NVIDIA Corporation.
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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, 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, 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. Today, the same compilers and tools are made available through NVIDIA under "The Portland Group Compilers and Tools" brand name.
PGI has been deeply involved in the expansion of the use of GPGPUs for high-performance computing, developing CUDA Fortran with NVIDIA Corporation and PGI Accelerator Fortran and C compilers 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.
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:
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.