HP to Adopt Portland Group's HPF for Exemplar Servers and Series 9000 Workstations.

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 14, 1996--Hewlett- Packard Company and The Portland Group, Inc. (PGI) today announced the two companies have signed an agreement whereby HP will offer PGI's High Performance Fortran (HPF) compiler on HP Exemplar servers and Series 9000 workstations.

"PGI's HPF is an important tool for many of HP's technical customers, particularly in areas such as oil and gas exploration and production," said Steve Wallach, chief technology officer for the Convex Division of HP's Technical Computing Business Unit. "HPF further expands the broad portfolio of programming options HP offers customers and application developers."

For scientists and engineers who develop or maintain applications for parallel computing systems, HPF is a parallel variant of Fortran that can provide a dramatic increase in productivity. Unlike message-passing or threads-based programming, HPF allows the programmer to write efficient parallel applications at a high level and eliminates the need to directly manage the interaction of the data and processors in a parallel system.

"HP recently outlined a very strong commitment to high-performance scientific and technical computing, and there can be no doubt that it will have a powerful presence in the HPC market," said Douglas Miles, director of marketing at PGI. "We are extremely pleased to have the opportunity to support HP and its customers."

"With the addition of HP, every major U.S. manufacturer of high-performance computing systems now has an HPF offering for its customers, either through internal development or through cooperative agreements with PGI," said Miles. "This is another clear signal that after a few years of intensive development, HPF is emerging as the de facto standard for implicit parallel Fortran programming on shared- and distributed-memory, high-performance computing systems. The Exemplar system architecture, based on CC-NUMA (cache-coherent non-uniform memory access), is an ideal platform for HPF, which allows programmers to optimize for a memory hierarchy."

The PGI HPF compiler is available now, through HP, on Exemplar servers and HP 9000 Series workstations. PGI and HP plan to cooperate to provide HPF on future HP parallel systems as well. Users can port and develop HPF applications on HP workstations and run them unchanged on the Exemplar server, providing a Fortran programming environment that mirrors the seamless integration of the HP product line, from the desktop to the top of the high-performance computing pyramid.

PGI is a leading independent vendor of software tools for parallel computing. PGI provides high-performance, retargetable, production quality compilers and software development tools to the high performance computing industry. Information about PGI and its products can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.pgroup.com.

Hewlett-Packard Company is a leading global manufacturer of computing, communications and measurement products and services recognized for excellence in quality and support. HP has 110,800 employees and had revenue of $31.5 billion in its 1995 fiscal year.

Information about HP and its technical server solutions can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.hp.com/go/techservers.

CONTACT: Hewlett-Packard Company

Kathy Sowards, 972/497-3061

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The Bernhardt Agency for PGI

Cheri Winterberg, 503/226-6452

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