PGI to Deliver OpenACC for Intel Xeon Phi

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This week the The Portland Group announced plans to extend its PGI Accelerator compiler technology with OpenACC to Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. Using their existing code bases and with only minor modifications to their build scripts, software developers using PGI Accelerator compilers will soon be able to target Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors as well.

Until now, industry CIOs and government and university lab directors have encountered difficult decisions when evaluating accelerator technologies,” said Douglas Miles, director, The Portland Group. “Do we wait to see which technologies win out? Which programming model or models do we choose? How do we retrain developers to use these programming models? Will our applications be future-proof and portable across the different types of host CPUs and coprocessors? PGI Accelerator compilers will make Xeon Phi coprocessors programmable using standard OpenACC directives that are fully compatible with the accelerator application development efforts already under way at most significant HPC centers and sites.”

First announced in mid-2009, PGI Accelerator compilers provide a high-level coprocessor programming model intended for scientists, engineers and other domain experts who aren’t full-time programmers. PGI Accelerator Fortran 2003, C and C++ compilers enable programmers to offload compute-intensive portions of an application to a coprocessor by adding portable compiler directives, treated as comments by other compilers, to existing standard-compliant programs and recompiling with appropriate compiler options. In 2012, the PGI Accelerator compilers were enhanced to support the new de facto standard OpenACC directives.

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