HPC compiler maker PGI announced today from ISC that they are in joint development on a new Fortran compiler for CUDA. This could make a big difference in the acceptance of CUDA in broader legacy scientific applications, which are pretty much all written in Fortran.
…Through function calls and language extensions, CUDA gives developers explicit control over the mapping of general-purpose computational kernels to GPUs as well as placement and movement of data between the x64 processor and the GPU. The NVIDIA CUDA C compiler already provides this capability to C programmers. The CUDA Fortran compiler will provide this same level of control and optimization in a native Fortran environment from PGI.
“Fortran support for CUDA GPUs is a perfect complement to our existing roadmap for the PGI Accelerator Fortran and C compilers,” said Douglas Miles, director, The Portland Group. “It enables interoperability of PGI Fortran and CUDA C and gives PGI users a full range of options in porting and optimizing Fortran applications to leverage the power of CUDA-enabled NVIDIA GPUs.”
PGI and NVIDIA plan to release the Fortran language spec for CUDA this week from ISC as well, and CUDA support is expected by November 2009 in PGI’s Fortran compilers. Wow, that’s fast.
