Thursday 24th August could be a date for your diary if you happen to be in the market for compilers and development tools for the high-performance computing arena. Especially that which nods towards parallelization and optimization functionality in order to squeeze multi-core processors to the max.

The Portland Group have named Thursday as the release date for its new version 6.2 PGI workstation compilers for C/C++ and Fortran, as well as development tool sets.

By providing a uniform optimizing and parallel C/C++ and Fortran application development environment across both 32-bit and 64-bit systems, on either AMD or Intel multi-core processors, and running either Linux or Windows, PGI users have the opportunity to maintain a single source-code base and build environment across something like 65% of the technical computing market platforms.

For those in the market for such tools, this latest release adds support for native 32-bit Windows users, enhances the PGI unified binary feature (a single x64 binary executable can contain code sequences which are optimized for both AMD and Intel x64 processors), support for SUSE 10.1 and RedHat Fedora Core 5, interoperability with Microsoft Compute Cluster Server 2003 interoperability and an improvement to the same for Microsoft Visual C++.

About the only thing that Portland is not shouting about loudly to the press is the pricing. I guess we, and you, will have to wait until Thursday for that...