NPAC Technical Report SCCS-327
Applications Benchmarking Set for Fortran-D and High Performance Fortran
A Mohmad, Geoffrey Fox, Gregor vonLaszewski, Manish Parashar, Tomasz Haupt, Kim Mills, Ying-Hua Lu, Neng-Tan Lin, Nang-kang Yeh
Submitted June 26 1992
Abstract
Fortran77, the currently accepted Fortran standard worldwide, is
essentially a sequential language which hides the parallelism of a
problem in sequential constructs like loops, etc. Consequently,
scientists wishing to use parallel computers must rewrite their
programs in an extension of Fortran that explicitly reflects the
architecture of the underlying machine, such as a message-passing
dialect for MIMD distributed-memory machines, array syntax for SIMD
machines, or an explicitly parallel dialect with synchronization for
MIMD shared-memory machines. This conversion is difficult, error
prone, and the resulting parallel codes are machine-specific.
To overcome these problems a new Fortran standard, or more precisely,
a standard of Fortran extensions, are necessary to establish a machine
independent programming model that is easy to use and yet, is
acceptably efficient on different parallel architectures. Thus
research is now concentrated on the provision of appropriate
high-level language constructs to enable users to design programs in
much the same way as they are accustomed to on a sequential machine.
Several proposals have been put forth in recent months for a set of
language extension to achieve this. To coordinate these efforts the
High Performance Fortran Forum (HPFF) has been created. HPFF is a
coalition of industrial and academic groups working to develop an
industry-wide standard of extensions to Fortran which provide support
for high performance programming on a wide variety of machines,
portable from workstations to massively parallel SIMD and MIMD
supercomputers. Fortran-D, a version of Fortran enhanced with data
decomposition directives, can provide such a programming model. We
believe that it can make parallel computing truly usable.
One of the elements of this program is to establish a reliable
validation strategy. In order to evaluate the efficiency of automatic
data partitioning schemes, a dedicated benchmarking suite is being
developed at NPAC and is described in this paper. Currently, the suite
is oriented towards validation of the Fortran-D compiler, which is
also being developed at NPAC in collaboration with Rice University. We
plan to augment it with applications written in other proposed HPF
dialects.