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PathScale Announces 64-bit Compilers For AMD Opteron Systems

PathScale Inc, developer of innovative software and hardware solutions to accelerate the performance and efficiency of Linux clusters, announced a suite of high-performance compilers for the AMD Opteron processor. PathScale compilers leverage the Opteron's high-performance 64-bit functionality and remarkable industry-leading price/performance benefits. Initial benchmarks on real application code and submitted SPEC results show that the PathScale Compiler Suite is the highest performance compiler for 64-bit Linux-based Opteron servers by a margin up to 40 percent.

According to analysts, the market need is clear for a balanced, high-performance 64-bit, fully-supported Opteron compiler. There is very strong HPC end-user interest in AMD Opteron-based servers. The added performance of the PathScale Compiler Suite will increase this interest and make Opteron the preferred choice for Linux cluster servers, altering the balance of power in the competition between AMD and Intel in the high-performance 64-bit market.

The PathScale compiler suite is based on stable, mature technology developed over a 10-year period by SGI, generally considered to be one of the most advanced 64-bit compiler code bases in the industry. The PathScale compiler development team is led by Dr. Fred Chow, formerly chief scientist at SGI, and recognized as one of the world's leading authorities on compiler technology.

The PathScale Compiler Suite includes C, C++ and Fortran 9X compilers that deliver:

• Industry-leading optimizations
• Complete support for 64-bit and 32-bit compilation
• Native code generation for the AMD64 ABI
• Compatibility with GNU/GCC tool chain and debuggers
• Binary and Source Code Compatibility.

In both floating point and integer-intensive performance benchmarks, PathScale compilers substantially out-performed competitive compiler offerings. Unlike other compilers that provide optimization for either floating point or integer (but not both), PathScale compilers deliver balanced performance results for floating point and integer computations as measured by SPEC and real applications codes.

The general availability of PathScale compilers in the first quarter of 2004 will help accelerate the adoption of Linux clusters for high-performance computing. This new advanced compiler technology will make it much simpler to develop and to deploy 64-bit applications for clustered Linux servers.