Install PGI Fortran Compilers on Linux & Mac OS X

Yet another Fortran compiler?

Honestly, I think that, whether you do have your favorite Fortran compiler or not, it is always interesting to check how your applications behave to different compilers.

After the GNU and the Intel Fortran compilers, we will describe here how to install the PGI Fortran compiler on Linux Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. The PGI Fortran compiler is also available for Mac OS X, and a link to download and install it is provided here.

PGI Compilers are products of the Portland Group, Inc. or PGI, a company that produces a set of commercially available compilers for high-performance computing systems, and which is a wholly owned subsidiary of NVIDIA Corporation. PGI compilers incorporate global optimization, vectorization, software pipelining, and shared-memory parallelization capabilities targeting both Intel and AMD processors.

   1. PGI Compilers for Linux

• Donwload the installation file

To proceed, first you have to create an account on the PGI website, in order to download the compiler. Please note that the activation Email from PGI could be delayed, we had to wait for almost 24-hours to receive it!

In the address below, you can download, in addition to the Fortran compilers, a whole set of PGI compilers (C/C++ and CUDA, among others), as well as debugging and memory evaluation tools.

http://www.pgroup.com/support/download_pgi2015.php?view=current

However, some of them are not free. We will discuss the licensing procedure later on.

• Before the installation

Two different versions are available for each compiler: Workstation or Server. The characteristics of each version are as follow:

– Workstation
All PGI Workstation products include a node–locked single–user license, meaning one user at a time can compile on the one system on which the PGI Workstation compilers and tools are installed. The product and license server are on the same local machine.

– Server
PGI Server products are offered in configurations identical to PGI Workstation, but include network floating multi–user licenses. This means that two or more users can use the PGI compilers and tools concurrently on any compatible system networked to the license server, that is, the system on which the PGI Server license keys are installed.

It is worth telling that the Workstation version is totally free and permanent, whereas the Server version is a 30-days trial version!

For this tutorial, we will proceed with the 32-bit PGI Fortran Workstation version, Linux Release 15.1, updated January 31, 2015.

Release 2015 includes, among other things, native OpenMP and auto-parallelizing Fortran 2003 compiler (PGFortran) and MPICH libraries, version 3.1.3, for 64-bit development environments (both Linux and Mac OS X).

You can also use the PGI tools to develop, debug, and profile MPI applications. Please note that The PGPROF MPI profiler and PGDBG debugger included with PGI Workstation and PGI Server are limited to 16 local processes.

PGI supports Linux Ubuntu 8.04+, including Ubuntu 14.10, as well as CentOS 5.2+, Fedora 4+ and SuSE 9.3+, among others.

A table, listing the processors on which the Release 2015 PGI compilers and tools are supported, is given. Please do refer to the PGI Installation Guide for more details about the supported OS, processors, as well as for additional components installation:

Click to access pgiinstall.pdf

Finally, before starting the installation, please consider installing the GNU C and GNU C++ compilers, or update them, if need be:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install build-essential

• Installation procedure

Use the following command sequence to unpack the .tar.gz file into a temporary directory before the installation:

mkdir /tmp/pgi
mv pgilinux-2015-151-x86.tar.gz.tar.gz /tmp/pgi
cd /tmp/pgi
gunzip pgilinux-2015-151-x86.tar.gz.tar.gz
tar -xvf pgilinux-2015-151-x86.tar.gz.tar

Run the installation scripts:

sudo ./install

The default installation folder is /opt/pgi/. You may choose to install the compiler in another directory.

When the installation script has completed, execute the following commands to make the PGI
products accessible and to initialize your environment for use. In your .bashrc file, insert the following commands:

export PGI=/opt/pgi;
export PATH=/opt/pgi/linux86-64/15.1/bin:$PATH;
export MANPATH="$MANPATH":/opt/pgi/linux86-64/15.1/man;
export LM_LICENSE_FILE="$LM_LICENSE_FILE":/opt/pgi/license.dat;

At this point, all you need to do is to configure your license-key. There are three ways to obtain a license-key for the PGI compilers and tools:

– Invoke PGI’s license generation tool:

/opt/pgi/linux86/15.1/bin/pgi_license_tool

– Login to your PGI account on www.pgroup.com. The hostid information for your computer is shown in the file /opt/pgi/license.info.

– Copy the licence-key provided in the Email sent by PGI prior to the installation.

Paste your license-key in the file /opt/pgi/license.dat.

You are done!

Please note that PGI provides permanent license key only for the PGI Workstation version of the compiler. Other versions, such as PGI Server or Accelarator compilers are provided with a renewable 30-days trial license!

Again, please refer to the license.info and the Installation Guide files for further details.

   2. PGI Compilers for Mac OS X

The PGI Fortran compiler is also available on the Mac OS X platform, namely Free PGI.

Free PGI for Mac OS X includes the PGI high-performance parallel C99 and Fortran 2003 compilers and parallel debugger for 64-bit and 32-bit Intel processor-based Macs.

Although the installation for the Mac OS X is not described here, it is relatively easy and doesn’t differ much from the Linux procedure.

The download and installation procedure are described in details at this address:

http://www.pgroup.com/products/freepgi/

This procedure has successfully been tested on a Linux Ubuntu 12.04 LTS system.