PGI Visual Fortran (PVF) brings the PGI suite of high-performance 64-bit and 32-bit parallel Fortran compilers to Microsoft Windows developers using Microsoft Visual Studio.

High-performance PGI Compilers
PVF features the latest version of PGI's native OpenMP and auto-parallel Fortran compilers. PGI compilers are supported on and can generate fully optimized code for a broad range of popular high-performance computing platforms including 64-bit x64 and 32-bit x86 processor-based systems.

PGI Fortran compilers offer world-class performance and features including both automatic and OpenMP 3.0 parallelization support for optimizing performance on multi-core processors. State-of-the-art compiler technologies found in PVF include vectorization, parallelization, interprocedural analysis, memory hierarchy optimization, cross file function inlining, CPU-specific optimization and more. PGI Unified Binary™ technology streamlines cross-platform support by combining into a single executable file code optimized for any number of different x64 processors.

PVF augments the Visual Studio debugger by adding a Fortran language specific custom debug engine. The PVF debug engine supports debugging of single and multi-thread, OpenMP, multi-thread MSMPI and hybrid MSMPI+OpenMP Fortran applications. It enables debugging of 64-bit or 32-bit applications using source code or assembly code, and provides full access to the registers and hardware state of the processors. Other multi-process MSMPI capabilities include Visual Studio property pages for configuring compile-time options, launching applications either locally on a workstation or on a distributed-memory Windows HPC Server 2008 cluster system, and debugging of programs running either locally or on a cluster.

Visual Studio Integration
PVF includes features to enable rapid code development. PVF adds syntax coloring, Fortran intrinsics tips and keyword completion to the Visual Studio editor. PVF includes a complete Fortran build environment for Visual Studio with Fortran specific features such as automatic build dependency management. PVF is interoperable with Microsoft Visual C++ so Fortran sub-programs can call C functions and vice versa. PVF includes a number of DVF/CVF compatibility features including full support for the Win32 API. Sample projects include building Fortran dialog boxes, console and Windows applications, DLLs and static libraries.

PVF augments the Visual Studio debugger with a custom debug engine that provides Fortran language specific debugging capability. The PVF debug engine supports debugging of single-thread, multi-thread, and OpenMP applications. It enables debugging of 64-bit or 32-bit applications using source code or assembly code, and it provides full access to the registers and hardware state of the processor. The PVF debug engine can debug executable files built for native Windows, Windows Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA) and Windows Services for UNIX (SFU). The PVF debug engine is interoperable with the Visual C++.

A Complete Fortran Development Solution
PGI Visual Fortran includes the Visual Studio 2008 Shell†—a complete stand-alone Windows Fortran development environment. No additional software is required. PVF also supports existing installations of Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2005 or both.