NPAC Technical Report SCCS-488

An Overview of High Performance Computing for the Physical Sciences

G Fox, P Coddington

Submitted May 01 1993


Abstract

We present an overview of the state of the art and future trends in high performance computing, and in particular data parallel computing. We describe recent progress in defining a standardized, portable, high level parallel language called High Performance Fortran, an extension of Fortran 90 designed for efficient implementation of data parallel applications on parallel, vector and sequential high performance computers. An outline of the language is presented, and we discuss its ability to handle different applications in computational science, concentrating on the difficulties of implementing irregular problems.


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