Absoft Fortran Compilers for Linux on 32-bit and 64-bit

Product Overview

Absoft's NEW Fortran compilers for Linux combine state-of-the-art code generation and optimization technology with solid reliability and the industry's most complete list of tools and libraries into a single package. This allows huge productivity gains while merely requiring recompilation of existing source code with no rewriting or reprogramming.

Best performance - According to the most popular industry benchmarks for Fortran, SPEC2000 and Polyhedron 2005, Absoft's new Fortran compilers produce the top 64-bit performance on both Xeon and Opteron processors and are fully source compatibility with previous Absoft compilers. Just upgrade and recompile to gain significant performance increases!

Highest reliability - Absoft's long-standing reliability is based on a mature code base - our Cray Research-based Fortran front-end is the most commercially weathered and reliable Fortran compiler front-end in the industry.

Fully source compatible - Absoft is the only commercial Fortran vendor offering a common Fortran solution across Linux, Windows and OS X with superior performance on both AMD and Intel processors. Absoft Fortran is fully compatible with existing Absoft Fortran compilers and the GNU tool chain, so existing Absoft customers need only to recompile their application to take advantage of significant additional performance.

Live, industry-leading technical support - Absoft has the reputation of the best Fortran technical support in the industry and is the best choice for a single point of contact for customers to receive top quality support.

Lowest price - Not only do our new, lower prices give you the best price/performance available, Absoft offers the only Fortran compilers with MaxFlex licensing which allows licenses to be reused freely across different platforms (Linux, Windows, OS X) from a single license server. These features represent significant cost savings for developers working in environments where computers and compilers need to be shared across multiple systems.

Key Benefits

Superior Performance
New Absoft Fortran Compilers for Linux use state-of-the-art optimization technology to deliver the best real-world application performance on AMD Athlon and Intel Xeon? processors. For developing Fortran in parallel environments, tools that can automatically restructure serial code for dual processors, add OpenMP directives or help build and debug complex code on a distributed cluster system are optionally available.

Ease of Use
The Absoft Fortran Compiler for Linux will install on any popular Linux distribution. Fortran includes a complete User Guide (.PDF) with clear examples of editing, compiling, debugging and running programs. To ensure customers obtain maximum performance, options are suggested for optimizations and compatibility. Linking with C/C++ is simple and the Absoft Fx2 Debugger included with this compiler is one of the only debugging solutions that can properly debug both Fortran and C/C++ programs. Pre-built math and graphics libraries are also included.

Compatibility
Absoft Fortran adheres to the latest ISO and ANSI Fortran 95 standards. The compiler is fully source-compatible with all previous and future versions of Absoft Fortran Compilers. Huge productivity gains can be attained by merely recompiling existing source code. For legacy applications, Absoft compilers support:

Key Features

• Industry leading performance and optimizations
• Superior reliability, compatibility, portability, support, pricing, and licensing options
• Fully source compatible with all previous and future Absoft Fortran releases for all supported operating systems (Linux, OS X, Windows) and processors (x32, x64, POWER)
• Advanced code generation and optimization technology with Cray-F90 based front-end
• 64-bit version generates code for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems; 32-bit version generates 32-bit code only
• Easy installation for any Linux distribution. 'Just Installs' without modification on the latest 64-bit Linux implementations from Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, and other major builds
• Conforms to the Linux Standard Base specification
• Compatible with glibc, gcc, g77, f2c, the GNU linker, debugger, assembler and make utility
• Fortran compiler operates in F95, F90 or F77 modes
• Includes Fx2 multi-language debugger for Fortran, C, C++, Assembler
• Multi-processing options including automatic parallelization and OpenMP tools

Absoft Fortran compilers also comes with several advanced features from the latest Fortran 2003 language specification which include:

• Allocatable attributes for derived type components
• IEEE floating point exception handling
• Pointers with INTENT attributes
• PROTECTED attributes
• VALUE attributes
• VOLATILE attributes
• Support for extended 63 character names

Product Description

Absoft's Fortran Compiler for Linux is unrivaled in both ease of use and its comprehensive list of features and typically generates code that performs as fast or faster than any other Fortran compiler. Absoft compilers conform to all DoD MIL-STD 1753, FIPS 69-1, and POSIX standards, support most popular VAX/VMS extensions including RECORD, STRUCTURE, POINTER, and UNION, (per V5.4 of VMS FORTRAN), QUAD data types as well as others from IBM/VS, Cray, Sun FORTRAN and FORTRAN 66 conventions. PIC code, automatic byte swapping, full integration with GNU tools and LSB compliance means porting code from any environment with Absoft requires little more than a recompilation. The easy-to-use Absoft Fortran compiler "just installs". A 2D/3D pre-compiled graphics library, pre-built BLAS, ATLAS and LAPACK90 libraries and technical support from friendly engineers is included at no additional charge.

Absoft is the only Fortran vendor offering bundle pricing on source-compatible Fortran solutions for all of today's popular computing platforms (Windows, Macintosh, and Linux). Customers save time and money with source-compatible Fortran solutions for all their development environments.

Options for an automatically parallelizing pre-processor, OpenMP and cluster configurations will be available. Technical support, service packs and software fixes are included with each license purchased at no additional charge.

Performance

The above chart summarizes the peformance of Absoft Fortran relative to that of other Fortran compilers running the Polyhedron Benchmark Suite on AMD Opteron? and Intel Xeon as tested by Polyhedron LTD.

System Requirements

• 64 bit machines
• AMD Turion, mobile x64AMD or Intel mobile x64
• Opteron 64-bit, Athlon 64-bit or Intel EM64T CPU
• 128 MB RAM
• 64-bit Linux
• OS must have 32-bit runtime support
• 32-bit glibc development package required to develop 32-bit applications
• Installs without modification on:
• SuSE 8.0 or later
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 or later
• 32 bit machines
• x586-class or above processor is required. This includes Intel Pentium I/II/III/IV, AMD K6/II/III, AMD Duron, AMD Athlon/XP/MP, Celeron, Xeon, Pentium M, Athlon64, and Opteron. SMP multi-processor machines are also supported.
• 64 MB RAM required, 128 MB or more recommended
• 15 MB free disk space
• An X-Windows capable graphics card is required to use the Fx2 GUI.
  The command line interface requires no graphics support.
• Installs without modification on:
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 or later
• Red Hat 7.3 or later including 9.0 or later
• SuSE 8.1 or later
• Mandrake 8.2 or later
• Fedora Core 1 or later