Nvidia Buys HPC Compiler Expert The Portland Group

US chip manufacturer Nvidia has announced the acquisition of High Performance Computing (HPC) software developer The Portland Group.

The Portland Group (PGI) produces a set of commercially available Fortran, C and C++ compilers for the supercomputing industry. The deal gives Nvidia an advantage in the HPC market, where it offers innovative GPU-accelerated architecture to compete with the traditional CPU-powered designs.

There are currently no details on the price of the acquisition.

Nvidia expands its toolkit

Since being founded in 1989, PGI has worked with Intel, IBM, Linux, ARM and obviously, Nvidia, collaborating on the CUDA Fortran.

The company is headquartered in Lake Oswego, Oregon. It develops compilers, debuggers, performance profilers and Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) specifically for the HPC applications.

Originally a privately held company, PGI was acquired by STMicroelectronics in December 2000.  It continued producing HPC compilers and tools under new management. However, it seems that Nvidia wasn’t happy with being just a client, and decided to buy the company outright.

Under the terms of the deal, PGI will continue developing OpenACC, CUDA Fortran and CUDA x86 projects. The acquisition doesn’t mean the company will stop working with its current customers either, even though some of them might directly compete with Nvidia.

“Bringing our teams together further cements our strong, established technical partnership in creating developer tools for the accelerated computing revolution. It also strengthens the OpenACC initiative to create an easy on-ramp to parallel computing by joining the world’s top independent provider of OpenACC compilers with the world’s best GPU designers,” said Ian Buck, general manager of GPU Computing Software at Nvidia.

Lat month, researchers from the University of Illinois and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine revealed they were able to use Blue Waters supercomputer, which features 3,000 Tesla K20X GPUs, to create a simulation of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), down to the atom level.

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