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Discussion

From our point of view, Fortran 90 (and its dialects including Fortran 90D/HPF) is not regarded as the natural portable language for SIMD computers [10], but as a natural language for parallelism of a class of what we have called synchronous and some loosely synchronous problems [13][14][12][11]. In Fortran 90D/HPF, parallelism is represented with parallel constructs, such as array operations, forall statements, and intrinsic functions.

A Fortran 90D/HPF program is a Fortran 90 program augmented with a set of data decomposition specifications. If these specifications are ignored the program can be run without change on a sequential machine. Compilers for parallel machines can use the specifications not only to decompose data but also to decompose computations. Moreover, the directives could be generated by an automatic partitioner in future version of compilers. A description of generating optimal alignment can be found in [40]. The distribution directives could be generated with a constraint-based approach [41] or with the guide of a performance estimator [42].


zbozkus@
Thu Jul 6 21:09:19 EDT 1995