Comments on Portland Group Fortran

Comments from Rodrigo Caballero Augi

I first heard of the pgf77 compiler from your fortran web page a few weeks
ago; a few days ago I decided to get a license and I've now installed and
done some simple benchmarking. I'm using a standard 200MHz Pentium Pro
with 128M RAM to do fluid dynamics simulations, and I've timed my code on
my machine and some others I have access to (a 233MHz Alpha 255, an SGI
Challange (don't know the clock rate), and a Cray C90). The code is not
particularly optimised for any of these machines. 

So, the results:

       compilation               secs

P6      g77 -O2                   112
        pgf77                      13
        pgf77 -tp p6 -O2           12

Alpha   f77                        14
        f77 -O5                    12

SGI     f77                        31
        f77 -O3                    18

Cray    cf77                        5
        cf77 -O scalar3 -O vector3  3

You will notice a slight ; ) improvement wrt g77! Also, the code now runs
just as fast as on the Alpha, which costs more than twice as much. The
test on the Cray I did at night and I'm pretty sure I had a CPU all to
myself - of course it's faster, but it also has a price tag 2 orders of
magnitude higher. With these figures, why should anyone buy anything but a
P6? 

On the whole I'm very pleased with my investment in the pgf77 compiler.
Documentation is good, compile times are fast (faster than on any of the
other machines) and I've recompiled all my libraries without any
compatibility problems at all. 

Jeffrey Templon
Last modified: Tue Feb 11 12:44:34 CET 2014