PathScale Invites Users of The Portland Group's PGI® Compilers to Upgrade to the Higher Performance PathScale EKOPath™ Compiler Suite

Offers Incentives for PGI Users to Switch to PathScale's Award-Winning 64-Bit Linux® Compilers for FORTRAN, C and C++

Earlier this week, The Portland Group announced Release 6.0 of PGI® Workstation, a suite of FORTRAN, C, and C++ compilers and development tools. It is reported that nearly all current users of PGI compilers will be required to pay additional fees or purchase new licenses to migrate to PGI Release 6.0. In addition, current PGI users will have to recompile their libraries, their applications and, potentially, recreate some of their object files in order to move to the new version of the PGI compiler, making the migration to PGI Release 6.0 non-trivial.

"When it comes time to write a check for a new compiler release and perform the migration work, we believe many users should and will prefer to upgrade to the proven performance of PathScale EKO compilers," said Art Goldberg, Chief Operating Officer for PathScale. "We are confident that developers of 64-bit Linux applications will see both performance and support advantages when they start working with PathScale. With the added financial incentives we're announcing, upgrading from PGI to PathScale is more beneficial than ever."

Benchmarks and real applications at a number of high performance computing (HPC) sites show that PathScale compilers out-perform PGI compilers, leading hundreds of HPC customers to select PathScale over PGI. All leading HPC suppliers including Sun Microsystems, IBM, HP, Fujitsu-Siemens and AMD have chosen to run SPEC® performance benchmark tests on their AMD Opteron™-processor based Linux systems exclusively with PathScale's compilers. For users who want to optimize the performance of their AMD64- and Intel EM64T™-based HPC applications, PathScale compilers are the clear choice.

All PathScale subscribers, even those downloading the free trial version, receive technical support directly from PathScale, widely recognized for providing superior user support. PathScale's paid subscribers receive all major PathScale upgrades for free.

Linux developers can make their own comparison of PGI versus PathScale by downloading the free 30-day trial version of the PathScale compiler suite from http://www.pathscale.com/trial.php

LinuxHPC.org has learned that the terms of the PGI to PathScale Trade-Up Program will include:

-- All current subscribers to PGI version 5.x compilers new to PathScale are eligible to upgrade to PathScale EKOPath via this program.
-- Current PGI customers can receive 20 percent off any order for PathScale compilers on a minimum of two-user licenses or a subscription period of two years or more.
-- Trade-up orders must be placed with PathScale or its Authorized Resellers no later than June 30, 2005.

Complete details on the Trade-Up Program will be posted next week at http://www.pathscale.com/tradeup.html

The latest release of the PathScale EKOPath Compiler Suite provides a number of performance improvements, including enhancements that allow users to leverage OpenMP Version 2.0 to parallelize applications on multi-processor nodes. Programmers can standardize on PathScale compilers for all their 64- and 32-bit x86 Linux computing needs on AMD and Intel platforms. In addition, EKOPath compilers now support a PathScale-optimized ACML 2.5 library (AMD Core Math Library) designed for use by a wide range of software developers to obtain the highest math function performance from applications running on AMD platforms.

About PathScale

Based in Mountain View, California, PathScale develops innovative software and hardware technologies that substantially increase the performance and efficiency of Linux clusters, the next significant wave in high-end computing. Applications that benefit from PathScale's technologies include seismic processing, complex physical modeling, EDA simulation, molecular modeling, biosciences, econometric modeling, computational chemistry, computational fluid dynamics, finite element analysis, weather modeling, resource optimization, decision support and data mining. PathScale's investors include Adams Street Partners, Charles River Ventures, Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, CMEA Ventures, ChevronTexaco Technology Ventures and the Dow Employees Pension Plan. For more details, visit http://www.pathscale.com , send email to sales@pathscale.com or telephone 1-650-934-8100.