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Since its introduction over three decades ago, Fortran has been the language of choice for scientific programming for sequential computers. Exploiting the full capability of modern architectures, however, increasingly requires more information than ordinary FORTRAN 77 or Fortran 90 programs provide. This information applies to such areas as:
The High Performance Fortran Forum (HPFF) was founded as a coalition of industrial and academic groups working to suggest a set of standard extensions to Fortran to provide the necessary information. Its intent was to develop extensions to Fortran that provide support for high performance programming on a wide variety of machines, including massively parallel SIMD and MIMD systems and vector processors. From its beginning, HPFF included most vendors delivering parallel machines, a number of government laboratories, and many university research groups. Public input was encouraged to the greatest extent possible. The result of this project is this document, intended to be a language specification portable from workstations to massively parallel supercomputers while being able to express the algorithms needed to achieve high performance on specific architectures.
Technical development was carried out by subgroups, and was reviewed by the full committee. Many people served in positions of responsibility:
Geoffrey Fox convened the first HPFF meeting with Ken Kennedy and
subsequently led a group to develop benchmarks for HPF. In addition,
Clemens-August Thole organized a complementary group in Europe and was
instrumental in making this an international effort. Charles Koelbel
took notes during every meeting and produced detailed minutes,
including summaries of the discussions, that were invaluable to the
subgroup heads in preparing successive revisions to the draft
proposal. Guy Steele developed macros for a variety of tasks,
including formatting BNF grammar, Fortran code and pseudocode, and
commentary material; the document would have been much less aesthetically
pleasing without his efforts.
Many companies, universities, and other entities supported their employees' attendance at the HPFF meetings, both directly and indirectly. The following organizations were represented at two or more meetings by the following individuals (not including those present at the first HPFF meeting in January of 1992, for which there is no accurate attendee list):
Alliant Computer Systems Corporation David Reese
Amoco Production Company Jerrold Wagener, Rex Page
Applied Parallel Research John Levesque, Rony Sawdayi, Gene Wagenbreth
Archipel Jean-Laurent Philippe
CONVEX Computer Corporation Joel Williamson
Cornell Theory Center David Presberg
Cray Research, Inc. Tom MacDonald, Andy Meltzer
Digital Equipment Corporation David Loveman
Fujitsu America Siamak Hassanzadeh, Ken Muira
Fujitsu Laboratories Hidetoshi Iwashita
GMD-I1.T, Sankt Augustin Clemens-August Thole
Hewlett Packard Maureen Hoffert, Tin-Fook Ngai, Richard Schooler
IBM Alan Adamson, Randy Scarborough, Marc Snir, Kate Stewart
Institute for Computer Applications in Science &Engineering Piyush Mehrotra
Intel Supercomputer Systems Division Bob Knighten
Lahey Computer Lev Dyadkin, Richard Fuhler, Thomas Lahey, Matt Snyder
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Mary Zosel
Los Alamos National Laboratory Ralph Brickner, Margaret Simmons
Louisiana State University J. Ramanujam
MasPar Computer Corporation Richard Swift
Meiko, Inc. James Cownie
nCUBE, Inc. Barry Keane, Venkata Konda
Ohio State University P. Sadayappan
Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology Robert Babb II
The Portland Group, Inc. Vince Schuster
Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science Robert Schreiber
Rice University Ken Kennedy, Charles Koelbel
Schlumberger Peter Highnam
Shell Don Heller
State University of New York at Buffalo Min-You Wu
SunPro and Sun Microsystems Prakash Narayan, Douglas Walls
Syracuse University Alok Choudhary, Tom Haupt
TNO-TU Delft Edwin Paalvast, Henk Sips
Thinking Machines Corporation Jim Bailey, Richard Shapiro, Guy Steele
United Technologies Corporation Richard Shapiro
University of Stuttgart Uwe Geuder, Bernhard Woerner, Roland Zink
University of Southampton John Merlin
University of Vienna Barbara Chapman, Hans Zima
Yale University Marina Chen, Aloke Majumdar
Many people contributed sections to the final language specification and HPF Journal of Development, including Alok Choudhary, Geoffrey Fox, Tom Haupt, Maureen Hoffert, Ken Kennedy, Robert Knighten, Charles Koelbel, David Loveman, Piyush Mehrotra, John Merlin, Tin-Fook Ngai, Rex Page, Sanjay Ranka, Robert Schreiber, Richard Shapiro, Marc Snir, Matt Snyder, Guy Steele, Richard Swift, Min-You Wu, and Mary Zosel. Many others contributed shorter passages and examples and corrected errors.
Because public input was encouraged on electronic mailing lists, it is difficult, if not impossible, to identify all of those who contributed to the discussions; the entire mailing list was well over 500 names long. The following list includes some of the active participants in the HPFF process not mentioned above:
The following organizations made the language draft available by anonymous FTP access and/or mail servers: AT&TBell Laboratories, Cornell Theory Center, GMD-I1.T (Sankt Augustin), Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Rice University, Syracuse University, and Thinking Machines Corporation. These outlets were instrumental in distributing the document.
The High Performance Fortran Forum also received a great deal of volunteer effort in nontechnical areas. Theresa Chatman and Ann Redelfs were responsible for most of the meeting planning and organization, including the first HPFF meeting, which drew over 125 people. Shaun Bonton, Rachele Harless, Rhonda Perales, Seryu Patel, and Daniel Swint helped with many logistical details. Danny Powell spent a great deal of time handling the financial details of the project. Without these people, it is unlikely that HPF would have been completed.
HPFF operated on a very tight budget (in reality, it had no budget when the first meeting was announced). The first meeting in Houston was entirely financed from the conferences budget of the Center for Research on Parallel Computation, an NSF Science and Technology Center. DARPA and NSF have supported research at various institutions that have made a significant contribution towards the development of High Performance Fortran. Their sponsored projects at Rice, Syracuse, and Yale Universities were particularly influential in the HPFF process. Support for several European participants was provided by ESPRIT through projects P6643 (PPPE) and P6516 (PREPARE).
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