The Portland Group was founded as a privately held company in 1989, using compiler technology developed at and acquired from
Floating Point Systems Inc. The first products, pipelining Fortran and C compilers, were released in 1991, targeting the
Intel i860 processor. These compilers were used on
Intel supercomputers like the
iPSC/860, the
Touchstone Delta, and the
Paragon, and were the compilers of choice for the majority of i860-based platforms. In the early 1990s, PGI was deeply involved in the development of
High Performance Fortran, or HPF, a data parallel language extension to
Fortran 90 which provides a portable programming interface for a wide variety of architectures. PGI produced an HPF compiler, called PGHPF, until its last release, version 15.10, on October 28, 2015. In 1996, PGI developed
x86 compilers for the
ASCI Red Supercomputer at
Sandia National Laboratories, the first computer system to sustain
teraflop performance. In 1997, PGI released x86 compilers for general use on
Linux workstations. The Portland Group was acquired by
STMicroelectronics on December 19, 2000. During
STMicroelectronics ownership, PGI operated as a wholly owned subsidiary producing high-performance computing (HPC) compilers and tools for Linux, Windows, Mac OS, and
STMicroelectronics ST100 series of embedded
DSP cores. PGI has been deeply involved in the expansion of the use of
GPGPUs for high-performance computing, developing CUDA Fortran with
Nvidia and PGI Accelerator Fortran and C compilers which use
programming directives. PGI and
NVIDIA have both participated in the specification of the new standard
OpenACC directives for GPU computing since it was first announced on November 3, 2011. On May 21, 2013, PGI released a compiler for the
OpenCL language on multi-core
ARM processors. Nvidia acquired PGI from
STMicroelectronics on July 29, 2013 On August 5, 2020, Nvidia announced that the "PGI Compilers and Tools" product line has evolved into a new NVIDIA HPC SDK product available as a free download from Nvidia. The Nvidia HPC SDK includes rebranded PGI compilers and added features for developing HPC applications. ==Product and market history==