The Portland Group recently announced the general availability of the PGI Release 8.0 line of high-performance compilers and development tools for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. PGI Release 8.0 includes full support for the recently announced OpenMP 3.0 multi-core parallel programming standard in Fortran and C across all supported platforms. The new release also adds support for building and debugging of OpenMPI applications on both Linux and MacOS, complementing existing MPI capabilities on Linux and Windows clusters. PGI 8.0 users can now develop and deploy multi-core and parallel applications on any of the major desktop or cluster operating systems using identical PGI compilers, the latest OpenMP features, MPI implementation of choice and bundled OpenMP/MPI-capable debugging and profiling tools. In a significant new development, PGI Release 8.0 also marks The Portland Group’s entry into the field of accelerated computing with provisional support for automatic offloading of parallel computations from x64 host processors to CUDA-enabled GPUs from NVIDIA.
New Performance Analysis Tools
In addition to building on a compiler and tools product line that now includes all best practices HPC and multi-core programming technologies, the PGI 8.0 compilers include an all-new capability to automatically analyze source code, produce an extensive database describing performance optimizations that are possible or inhibited, and provide advice for modifying the source code to take advantage of the possible optimizations. With Release 8.0, PGI has standardized the organization and interface to this data through the Common Compiler Feedback Format (CCFF). PGI is publishing the CCFF standard and making access to it freely available in an effort to improve the utility and interoperability of PGI, third-party and research-community software tuning tools. More information on CCFF is available from the PGI website at http://www.pgroup.com/ccff.
PGI’s PGPROF8.0 performance profiler displays CCFF data coupled with user source code in a logical, compact and intuitive graphical user interface (GUI). A command-line interface is also supported. Programmers can quickly and easily identify code segments that are already well-structured, as well as those that can be restructured to improve performance. In addition to identifying sections of an application that consume most of the compute time or system resources, PGPROF provides developers with specific actionable performance optimization feedback about their source code. The data, presented on a per-thread and/or per-process basis, simplifies performance tuning by identifying:
· Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) vector loops, and why vectorization is inhibited on non-vector loops
· Loops auto-parallelized for multi-core, and why parallelization is inhibited on serial loops
· Loops that are candidates for OpenMP parallelization
· Compute intensity of loops, and candidates for offloading to a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) or accelerator
· Loops with very small or very large iteration counts, and how they can be modified to maximize performance for SSE and the cache-based memory hierarchy
· Data prefetching, and opportunities for prefetch tuning using directives and pragmas
In addition to these detailed analyses, PGPROF also includes overall program level analyses including information about in-lined functions and subroutines and information about how each file was compiled, comprehensive system configuration information and many other performance-critical characteristics of Fortran, C and C++ source code. Unlike traditional performance tuning tools which only report on and help tune performance for a specific type of processor or system, or focus solely on parallelization, the PGI 8.0 compilers and tools provide developers with feedback and insight on how to restructure loops and algorithms to enhance performance on any modern multi-core x64 CPU or GPU accelerator.
Provisional GPU Support
PGI Release 8.0 also includes a technology preview of the industry's first Fortran and C compilers that automatically offload computations from an x64 host program to a GPU. Until now, C and C++ developers targeting GPU accelerators have had to rely on language extensions to their programs. Use of GPUs from Fortran applications has been extremely limited. x64+GPU programmers have been required to program at a detailed level including a need to understand and specify data usage information and manually construct sequences of calls to manage all movement of data between the x64 host and GPU. Using the provisional support in PGI Release 8.0, programmers can accelerate Linux applications on x64+GPU platforms by adding OpenMP-like compiler directives to existing high-level standard-compliant Fortran and C programs and then recompiling with appropriate compiler options.
The Portland Group, www.pgroup.com
STMicroelectronics, www.st.com.
