High Performance Fortran: A Practical Analysis

Article type: Research Article

Authors: KNIES, ALLAN | O'KEEFE, MATTHEW | MACDONALD, TOM

Affiliations: School of Electrical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907-1285 | Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455 | MPP Compilers, Cray Research Incorporated, Eagan, MN 55121

Abstract: The recently released high performance Fortran forum (HPFF) proposal has stirred much interest in the high performance computing industry. HPFF's most important design goal is to create a language that has source code portability and that achieves high performance on single instruction multiple data (SIMD), distributed-memory multiple instruction multiple data (MIMD), and shared-memory MIMD architectures. The HPFF proposal brings to the forefront many questions about design of portable and efficient languages for parallel machines. In this article, we discuss issues that need to be addressed before an efficient production quality compiler will be available for any such language. We examine some specific issues that are related to HPF's model of computation and analyze several implementation issues. We also provide some results from another data parallel compiler to help gain insight on some of the implementation issues that are relevant to HPF. Finally, we provide a summary of options currently available for application developers in industry.

Journal: Scientific Programming, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 187-199, 1994