Absoft Corporation Announces New Fortran64 Toolset for AMD Opteron™ Processor-Based Systems

Rochester Hills, MI -- 4/22/2003 -- Absoft Corporation today announced a new 64-bit Fortran toolset for AMD Opteron™ processor-based Linux systems.

Absoft’s new Fortran64 toolset includes a native ANSI Fortran 95 compiler, which utilizes a modified version of the Cray CF90 front end. It supports extensions from popular workstations and mainframes. In the new Fortran64 toolset, Absoft plans to include VAX/Unix subroutine compatibility routines, the AMD core math library, FFTW, ATLAS and other libraries designed to facilitate porting code.

“Fortran64 is designed to help customers quickly and easily port existing 32- and 64-bit applications to systems based on AMD Opteron processor to take full advantage of the benefits of 64-bit computing. Typcially the applications require few or no source modifications,” says Wood Lotz, president of Absoft.

Using Fortran64, customers can leverage their 32-bit code base to easily take advantage of the AMD Opteron processor’s larger address space, which means most programs will run faster, especially memory intensive programs such as CFD packages. Fortran64 is compliant with the x86-64 ABI, Linux Standard Base, supports shared libraries, provides a natural C interface to Linux, and is compatible with gcc and other gnu tools including the gdb debugger. Tools for auto parallelizatin of serial code, support for OpenMP, cluster configurations and third party products such as IMSL Math & Stat libraries, and Streamline’s Distributed Debugging Tool (DDT) will be available. A version of Fortran64 for Windows, which will include a complete IDE, is also planned.

“AMD expects that Absoft’s Fortan64 will help customers speed and simplify application porting. In some cases, rehosting code to a native 64-bit environment will require only a simple recompile, saving our customers time and money as they migrate to the powerful 64-bit AMD Opteron processor platform,” said Rich Heye, vice president and general manager of AMD’s Microprocessor Business Unit.

About Absoft Corporation
Absoft Corporation has been a leader in the development of high performance Fortran compilation systems since 1979. Absoft specializes in commodity platforms and is the only Fortran vendor to offer source compatible Fortran toolsets across all of today’s commodity platforms (Windows, Linux and Macintosh). Absoft products are distributed world-wide. Additional details are available at: http://www.absoft.com.