Questions about no new PGI community release, new HPC Kit SDK

Hi,
let me ask some questions:
0) curious on PGI release with CUDA 11.0 /Ampere support… will be in next release: 20.5/20.6?

  1. curious why no PGI 20.4 community edition… last was last October… are you waiting for Ampere/CUDA 11.0 support on PGI (maybe in 20.5) and then release a community version with it… so users don’t have to wait until PGI 20.10 for CUDA 11.0? if that’s the reason, that’s good news…
  2. NVIDIA HPC Kit SDK: seems to have some relation to PGI as it includes Fortran support… but sadly seems Linux only no Windows support… does this hint PGI will be removing Windows support in the future? hope not…
    also can share some hints on differences between PGI and NV HPC Kit SDK compilers…
    thanks…

Hi Ivangar,

  1. curious on PGI release with CUDA 11.0 /Ampere support… will be in next release: 20.5/20.6?

20.4 was the final release with the PGI brand name. The NVIDIA HPC SDK, with the re-branded NV compilers, will include CUDA 11 and Ampere support in a future release.

  1. curious why no PGI 20.4 community edition… last was last October… are you waiting for Ampere/CUDA 11.0 support on PGI (maybe in 20.5) and then release a community version with it… so users don’t have to wait until PGI 20.10 for CUDA 11.0? if that’s the reason, that’s good news…

Correct, no more Community Editions. But the new NVIDIA HPC SDK will be no cost with registration. We’ll also provide one to two releases per year that do not require registration, with the first one being later in the year.

You can sign-up for the Early Access release of the NVIDIA HPC SDK at: https://developer.nvidia.com/hpc-sdk

NVIDIA HPC Kit SDK: seems to have some relation to PGI as it includes Fortran support… but sadly seems Linux only no Windows support… does this hint PGI will be removing Windows support in the future? hope not… also can share some hints on differences between PGI and NV HPC Kit SDK compilers…

The differences are just paint deep. “nvfortran” is the same as “pgfortran”, just a different name and updated version. Though we’ve only added the new features such as ARM support, Ampere, CUDA 11, C++17 standard language parallelism, etc., to the NV compilers.

Correct, initially the NV HPC SDK will only be available on Linux but we will be releasing on Windows in the future.

Hope this helps clarify things,
Mat

Hi Mat,
many thanks for detailed response…
you have solved all my doubts!
already applied for early acess…

Best,
Oscar.

Hi Mat,
I forgot to say two things:

  1. not super interested, but also what about MacOS support? even PGI has no GPU support under Mac having an additional compiler on Mac can be useful…
  2. I plan to test NV HPC Kit SDK under new Windows WSL2 with CUDA support coming next month…
    will report any issues in case I find anything…

thanks…
Oscar.

Hi Oscar,

  1. not super interested, but also what about MacOS support? even PGI has no GPU support under Mac having an additional compiler on Mac can be useful…

We actually stopped supporting MacOSX as of the 20.1 release.

  1. I plan to test NV HPC Kit SDK under new Windows WSL2 with CUDA support coming next month…
    will report any issues in case I find anything…

Sounds good, though we don’t support WSL so I have no idea what issues you’ll encounter or even if it will work. I can report anything you find but doubtful will fix it, unless it can be replicated on Linux.

-Mat