The Portland Group's new PGI Visual Fortran system integrates PGI compilers with Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 tool set.

The Portland Group, or PGI, a maker of high-performance compilers and tools, has announced the availability of PGI Visual Fortran, which integrates PGI's technology with Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 tool set.

PGI developed PVF to integrate the company's suite of high-performance parallelizing 64-bit and 32-bit Fortran compilers and tools with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to provide a developer solution to scientists and engineers upgrading from 32-bit to 64-bit Microsoft Windows platforms, the company said.

PVF features the latest version of PGI's native OpenMP and auto-parallelizing compilers for the Fortran 77 and Fortran 95 programming languages. OpenMP is a specification for a set of compiler directives, library routines and environment variables that can be used to specify shared memory parallelism in Fortran and C/C++ programs. The MP in OpenMP stands for multiprocessing.

In addition, PVF includes features such as a Fortran-aware text editor; a custom build engine for Fortran applications; a custom debug engine with language-specific Fortran debugging capability; support for debugging single-thread, multithread and OpenMP parallel applications; Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 interoperability; and support for debugging mixed PGI Fortran and Visual C++ 2005 applications, said PGI, a wholly owned subsidiary of Geneva-based STMicroelectronics.

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"With the release of PVF, The Portland Group can offer, as an option, its suite of parallel Fortran compilers and tools for multicore processors to the large base of scientists and engineers developing for the Windows platform with Visual Studio," Douglas Miles, director of PGI, in Lake Oswego, Ore., said in a statement.

Moreover, PVF gives Windows developers "a comprehensive solution for leveraging the wide array of new microprocessor innovations from both AMD and Intel, and the ability to take advantage of new HPC [high-performance computing] technologies from Microsoft, such as Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003," Miles said.

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.

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