NVidia Buys the Portland Group

NVidia announced that it is purchasing the Portland Group. The Portland Group (PGI) is a compiler vendor that specializes in parallel computing and HPC. The PGI team has played a role in developing standards such as the OpenACC programming interface, and PGI continues to support the CUDA Fortran and CUDA x86 parallel programming platforms.

With this purchase, NVidia arms with some serious HPC technology for its further entry into the HPC market. Once primarily a maker of PC graphics cards, NVidia is increasingly becoming a player in the HPC sphere. With the rise of GPUs as competitive HPC technology, NVidia’s graphics hardware is suddenly in demand, and the recent surge of interest in ARM processors provides a further means to disrupt Intel’s dominance in the HPC space.

According to NVidia’s Ian Buck, “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.”

PGI will continue to operate under its own brand and, according to Nvidia, they will “… continue to serve their wide range of customers – including chip makers, research labs, and HPC computing centers.”