The Portland Group (PGI) has introduced an elegant way to augment existing HPC applications, allowing them to run efficiently on GP-GPUs while still maintaining their original code structure using standard Fortran or C. Creating GP-GPU programs can require new programming methods that often introduce additional work and code revisions, or even re-writes. This can become an obstacle to the adoption of GP-GPU technology. The PGI Accelerator Programming Model provides a solution to this problem by working within a familiar HPC programming environment.
PGI’s approach provides a set of directives that allow Fortran and C programs to use NVIDIA GP-GPUs with a small amount of programming effort. Users may easily start to experiment with simple acc directives, and then add optimizations for data movement between the host and the GP-GPU.
“The PGI Accelerator programming model is both complete and compact. Practically speaking, it provides a high-level framework for programming nearly any type of accelerator hardware, including NVIDIA GPUs, AMD APUs, Intel MIC (Many Integrated Cores), FPGAs, IBM Cell, and others. The model currently targets NVIDIA GPUs, but it’s a relatively easy step for PGI to extend it to other targets. The high-level PGI model also has two other potentially important advantages for developers: it can preserve portability as hardware continues to evolve, and it can preserve existing x86 code bases.
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