PGI Visual Fortran 9.0 adds support for MPI debugging on Windows HPC Server 2008 clusters

SINGAPORE: The Portland Group, a wholly-owned subsidiary of STMicroelectronics, today announced the general availability of PGI Visual Fortran (PVF) Release 9.0 for Windows workstations, servers and clusters.

PVF 9.0 is the first general release to include support for the building, launching and debugging of Microsoft MPI (MSMPI) Fortran applications from within the Microsoft Visual Studio integrated development environment.

PVF augments the Visual Studio debugger by adding a Fortran language specific custom debug engine. The PVF debug engine supports debugging of single- and multi-thread, OpenMP, multi-thread MSMPI and hybrid MSMPI+OpenMP Fortran applications.

It enables debugging of 64-bit or 32-bit applications using source code or assembly code, and provides full access to the registers and hardware state of the processors.

Other new multi-process MSMPI capabilities in PVF 9.0 include Visual Studio property pages for configuring compile-time options, launching applications either locally on a workstation or on a distributed-memory Windows HPC Server 2008 cluster system, and debugging of programs running either locally or on a cluster.

“PVF 9.0 is a big step forward in ease-of-use for HPC Fortran programmers porting applications to or developing applications for Windows workstations, servers and clusters,” said Douglas Miles, director, The Portland Group.

“For Windows Fortran users looking to leverage the power of Windows HPC Server 2008 clusters, the ability to cover all aspects of MPI and parallel Fortran application development from within the Microsoft Visual Studio IDE can simplify their work considerably.

“The majority of HPC applications are still written in Fortran and parallelized using MPI and OpenMP,” said Vince Mendillo, Director, Technical Computing Marketing, Microsoft.

“By including MSMPI job launch and debugging support within PGI Visual Fortran, PGI has further enhanced the Windows HPC Server 2008 ecosystem and simplified porting of HPC applications to Windows clusters.”

Additional new features in PVF 9.0 include support for Intel Core i7 (Nehalem) and Six-Core AMD Opteron (Istanbul) processors, several incremental Fortran 2003 features, improvements in serial debugging and disassembly speed, and completely updated documentation and online help.

PGI Visual Fortran is compatible with both the current version of Visual Studio, Visual Studio 2008, and the previous version, Visual Studio 2005.

PGI Release 9.0 is the first general release to include support for the high-level PGI Accelerator™ programming model on x64 processor-based Linux systems incorporating NVIDIA CUDA-enabled GPUs. Announced last month, the PGI Release 9.0 line of high-performance parallelizing compilers and development tools for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows is now available.