The Portland Group (PGI) Signs Agreement with Intel Corp.; PGI to Provide Parallelizing Compilers for Intel Pentium Pro Systems.

WILSONVILLE, Ore.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 30, 1996--The Portland Group Inc., a leading independent vendor of software tools for parallel computing, today announced it has signed a contract to supply Intel Corp. with optimizing Pentium(R) Pro C, C++, Fortran, and HPF compilers.

These compilers, which will eventually be available to all users of Pentium Pro systems, will initially be used on the world's first teraflops supercomputer to be installed at Sandia National Laboratories later this year as part of the Department of Energy's (DOE) Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI).

"PGI continues to play a key role as the supplier of all of our C, C++, and Fortran compilers," said Dick Ammerman, Teraflops program manager at Intel. "Intel pioneered the concept of large-scale parallel computing systems built around commodity components, and compilers and tools are obviously key software components in any effective parallel computing system.

"We've found PGI to be a reliable partner who can supply us with robust state-of-the-art parallelizing compilers which we integrate into our systems with a minimum of internal effort."

The teraflops machine Intel is delivering to Sandia for the DOE ASCI program uses a hybrid shared-distributed memory architecture where each distributed-memory node consists of two Intel Pentium Pro processors sharing a common local memory. The PGI C, C++, and Fortran compilers can auto-parallelize existing code for execution on each shared-memory node.

Using explicit and implicit scalable parallel programming models, these shared-memory kernels will be used to develop large-scale parallel applications which utilize thousands of processors concurrently.

"DOE's ASCI is developing large-scale applications codes that require 10,000 times greater performance over the next 10 years than computers in use today," said Art Hale, manager of Sandia's Parallel Computing Science Department.

"The Intel teraflops system will provide close to the first factor of 10 of that increase when coupled to the optimizing compilers and advanced parallel development tools being provided by The Portland Group. The Portland Group's compilers will be instrumental in helping ASCI achieve it's early goals."

"We are very pleased to be working with Intel and its teraflops team to supply Sandia with the robust, high-performance parallelizing Pentium(R) Pro compilers needed for ASCI applications development," said Doug Miles, director of marketing at PGI.

"High quality, optimizing compilers are key to any high performance computer operation. We expect the successful launch of the teraflops system to validate the role of PGI compilers on Pentium Pro servers and workstation systems."

Sandia National Laboratories is a multiprogram DOE laboratory operated by a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corp.

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. -0-

PGI is a trademark of The Portland Group, Inc. Other brands and names are property of their respective owners.

CONTACT: The Portland Group Inc.

Denney Cole, 503/682-2806

sales(at)pgroup.com

http://www.pgroup.com

or

The Bernhardt Agency

Cheri Maniscalco, 503/226-6452

cherim(at)bernhardt.com