PGI 20.4 was the last PGI branded release and no additional Community Editions will be made available. PGI has been re-branded as the NVIDIA HPC Compiler and is part of NVIDIA’s HPC SDK (https://developer.nvidia.com/hpc-sdk). “nvfortran” is the re-branded “pgfortran”,
The NVIDIA HPC SDK is available at no-cost for all releases but does require registration as an NVIDIA developer. Version 20.5 is currently available as an early access release, so you’ll need to apply for access, but the application using only takes a few days for approval. The first official release, will be available in a few weeks.
Similar to the PGI Community Edition, we plan on making a release available without registration, twice a year.
(Q3) Finally, would CUDA programming be better, given the OpenACC standard related issues?
I’ll respectfully disagree that there’s a standard issue here. But to answer your question, no, I don’t believe moving to CUDA would help in this case. Writing efficient reduction code in CUDA can be quite cumbersome while OpenACC can implicitly generate optimized reductions for you.
We actually created the CUF kernels directive in CUDA Fortran, which is similar to OpenACC, mostly because writing reductions in CUDA is such a pain. Much easier to let the compiler do it for you.