August 18, 2006 

http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/805916.html

The Portland Group, a supplier of compilers and development tools for high performance computing, has announced availability of its PGI Cluster Development Kit (CDK) in a roll configuration compatible with the Rocks cluster software distribution technology. The PGI CDK is a turnkey suite of software for building and testing programs designed to take advantage of the performance of Linux clusters. The Portland Group developed the PGI roll for Rocks with the leading Rocks' technologies supplier Platform Computing of Singapore.

As cluster acquisition and support costs have declined, in part through management technologies such as Rocks, clusters are finding acceptance in a wider range of cost and performance sensitive scientific applications as well as in other industries demanding high performance computing, including financial services, computer graphics and animation, and pharmaceuticals.

"Rocks is making Linux clusters more accessible to growing audience," said Douglas Miles, director, The Portland Group. "Offering the PGI CDK as a Rocks roll greatly simplifies the installation and upgrading of PGI optimizing compilers and tools for the Rocks user community, and is a significant addition to our overall strategy to support the Linux operating system in a comprehensive way."

Rocks technology and the Rocks group originated in April 2000 at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The group was formed, in part, to address the difficulties of deploying manageable clusters. Unlike other cluster management tools that attempt to manage clusters by comparing node configurations, Rocks uses operating system installation on a node as the basic management tool. Rocks technology is intended to make administering and reconfiguring clusters easier, faster, more reliable, and more secure. This combination of attributes makes Rocks technology an attractive option for organizations wishing to take advantage of the benefits of clusters without taking on the cost of a cluster administration specialist.

"Platform Computing is delighted to see The Portland Group as part of the growing Rocks ecosystem," said Gary Tyreman, vice president, Open Cluster Group, Platform Computing. "Advanced development tools are invaluable to tuning high performance applications that take full advantage of the price-performance leading cluster architectures enabled by Rocks."

The PGI CDK is comprised of PGI compilers and tools as well as a number of other software libraries and utilities specifically designed to facilitate cluster setup and deployment. A compiler is a software tool that translates applications from the high-level programming languages used by software developers into a binary form a computer can execute.

All PGI compilers and tools feature full native support for OpenMP parallel programming extensions; full support for 64-bit addressing; native integrated scalar and vector SSE/SSE2/SSE3 code generation; and a bundled version of the ACML, a library of optimized numeric functions for mathematical, engineering, scientific, and financial applications. PGI compilers are optimized for both 32-bit and 64-bit AMD64 and EM64T processors.

The PGI CDK tool suite includes special MPI-enabled versions of the PGDBG graphical parallel debugger and PGPROF graphical parallel performance profiler. MPI, or Message Passing Interface, is the most popular cluster parallel programming model. The PGI CDK includes both first-generation MPICH1 and the newer MPICH2 libraries.