High Performance Fortran (HPF) is an informal standard for extensions to Fortran to assist its implementation on parallel architectures, particularly for data-parallel computation. Among other things, it includes directives for expressing data distribution across multiple memories, extra facilities for expressing data parallel and concurrent execution, and a mechanism for interfacing HPF to other languages and programming models.
This tutorial will provide a comprehensive introduction to HPF 2.0, the latest version of the HPF standard which was published in early 1997. It will also cover some Fortran 90 and Fortran 95 features that are important for HPF, such as array syntax, explicit interfaces, FORALL and pure procedures. It will also outline the history of the HPF language development and give pointers to information on HPF compilers, tools and projects.
Dr John Merlin is a research fellow at the VCPC. He obtained his D.Phil in Theoretical physics from Oxford University in 1986, and was a research fellow and senior research fellow in the Department of Physics and the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University from 1986 - 1996. He was active in the development of the High Performance Fortran (HPF) language as a member of the HPF Forum, and was co-developer of a public domain HPF compilation system, SHPF. His current research interests are in integrating HPF with other programming models, HPF compilation, and developing tools for high perfomance computing.
Dr Cecile Germain is an assistant professor at Paris-Sud University and a member of Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique (LRI). She obtained a PhD in Computer Science in 1989. Her work in HPF compilers focused on code generation for regular and irregular applications. She has contributed to the Adaptor compilation system from GMD. Her current research interests are HPF compilation, experiments on large irregular numerical applications and interfacing HPF and Java.