Goals and Scope of High Performance Fortran

 

The primary goals behind the development of the HPF language include:

• Support for data parallel programming (single threaded, global name space, and loosely synchronous parallel computation);
• Portability across different architectures;
• High performance on parallel computers with non-uniform memory access costs (while not impeding performance on other machines);
• Use of Standard Fortran (currently Fortran 95) as a base;
• Open interfaces and interoperability with other languages (e.g., C) and other programming paradigms (e.g., message passing using MPI).

Secondary goals include:

• Implementation feasibility within a limited time span;
• Provision of input to future standards activities for Fortran and C;
• Provision of an evolutionary path for adding advanced features to the language in a consistent manner.

The first version of the language definition, HPF 1.0 was released in May 1993. A number of language features that were defined in HPF 1.0 have now been absorbed into the Fortran 95 language standard (e.g., the FORALL statement and construct, and PURE procedures). These features are therefore no longer detailed in the definition of HPF 2.0. Information about the evolution of the HPF language (through versions 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0) and an enumeration of the differences between HPF 2.0 from HPF 1.1 may be found in subsection 1.4.