Portland Group Fortran Compilers

The Portland Group has released high-performance Fortran (HPF, a dialect of Fortran-90) and Fortran-77 compiler products for Linux/86. Pentium-Pro optimizations are specifically included. I'm speaking from limited experience with the beta F77 product, and very skimpy experience with a trial license of HPF. Thus, the usual prophylactic remarks apply.

They support a number of DEC/VAX and other F77 extensions in both the HPF and F77 products (e.g. STRUCTUREs.) Their original F77 beta I got did not properly compile certain STRUCTUREs in our big code (the specific death knell was that the compiler could not handle nested UNION/MAP constructs,) but they got back to me within three days with a bugfix which did indeed fix the problem. Speaks well for their tech support.

The compiler seems to be very fast, even more so than Absoft. I'm talking compile speed here. I have yet to run benchmarks.

The compiler is able to make use of SMP under Linux if you have multiple processors installed.

A profiler is included. They now have a symbolic debugger product (I have not yet tested it). This debugger was supposed to be HPF-aware.
The package is very nice - lots of printed documentation, plus a CD-ROM with manuals in hypertext plus the complete software distribution. The compiler's error messages are informative, and there are lots of flags which allow fine-tuning of the code optimization.


Jeffrey Templon
Last modified: Wed Jan 27 16:39:50 EST 1999