OIL & GAS

The Portland Group, a wholly-owned subsidiary of STMicroelectronics, today announced general availability of a technology preview edition of its PGI Workstation suite of Fortran, C, and C++ compilers and development tools for Microsoft's new Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition operating systems. PGI compilers and tools are used widely in supercomputing, the field of technical computing engaged in the modeling and simulation of complex processes, such as ocean modeling, weather forecasting, seismic analysis, bioinformatics and other areas. Historically, PGI compilers and tools have been used predominantly on 32-bit and 64-bit Linux workstations, servers, and clusters based on microprocessors from AMD and Intel. The Portland Group extends to these same platforms support for the new Microsoft 64-bit operating systems with the availability of this preview edition. "We continue to see an accelerating trend towards the adoption of mainstream 64-bit hardware platforms and operating systems in the HPC market," said Douglas Miles, director, The Portland Group. "PGI compilers are recognized in the HPC community for delivering world-class performance across a wide spectrum of applications and benchmarks, and they are referenced regularly as the industry standard for performance and reliability. The introduction of PGI Workstation 6.0 offers the HPC community the much needed choice of both major 64-bit x86 processing platforms and 64-bit operating systems, thus widening that spectrum." "PGI has been instrumental in cooperatively working to ensure that the HPC community has access to the compilers and tools needed to take full advantage of the award-winning simultaneous 32- and 64-bit computing delivered by AMD64 technology," said Pat Patla, director, server/workstation marketing, Microprocessor Business Unit, Computation Products Group, AMD. "As the AMD64 ecosystem continues to grow and include mainstream operating systems, we congratulate PGI on their foresight and continued leadership in 64-bit computing." The PGI Workstation suite includes the PGF77, PGF95, PGCC, and PGC++ compilers for the FORTRAN 77, Fortran 95, C, and C++ programming languages, respectively. All PGI compilers and tools 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/SSE2 code generation; and a bundled version of the ACML 2.5 library of highly optimized numeric functions for mathematical, engineering, scientific, and financial applications. PGI Workstation is highly optimized for both 32-bit and 64-bit AMD64 and EM64T processors. Included in this preview edition of PGI compilers is a UNIX-like shell command interface under 64-bit Windows that is compatible with UNIX/Linux environments, the traditional operating system of choice in the HPC field. The PGDBG and PGPROF parallel debugging and profiling tools provide full- featured graphical user interfaces that are 100% compatible with the Linux versions, creating an environment that is ideal for programmers porting applications from Linux to 64-bit Windows. Complete information on the preview edition of PGI compilers for Microsoft's 64-bit Windows operating systems is available from The Portland Group web site at www.pgroup.com .