The Portland Group Guarantees 2x GPU Performance

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In the world of HPC, performance claims often come with a disclaimer something like, “You’re mileage may vary.” Not this time.

Roy Kim writes that The Portland Group (PGI) has launched the 2x in 4 Weeks. Guaranteed Program designed to help developers achieve up to 2x speedups in their applications on GPUs in a month or less of development time.

PGI has been working on what you might call a “magic” compiler, called the “PGI Accelerator.” Technically speaking, it’s an auto-parallelizing compiler. It enables programmers to realize immediate acceleration of their application code, without requiring them to modify or adapt the underlying code itself. The compiler only requires the programmer to provide simple hints (known as “directives”), about which portion of an application’s code needs to be parallelized. The compiler then does the heavy lifting — automatically parallelizing that portion of the code.

Simply sign up to get a trial copy of the PGI Accelerator compiler and try it out. We guarantee you will get 2x application speed-up in less than a month of development time. If you don’t, PGI will offer four hours of expert consultation to accelerate your code.

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Comments

  1. This one has a YMMV clause too. From the project FAQ:
    “Code structure in your application must be consistent with those structures recommended
    in the “Are Directives Right for You?” document, under the section titled “Code Structures
    That Work with Directives”. “

  2. 2x in 4 weeks:

    4 weeks of Grad student time @ 40K per year is about $3k

    Could you buy enough hardware for a 2x speedup with $3k ?

    As you go up the scale to postdoc, staff scientist etc the $ amount obviously increases