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Overview

This thesis describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of the Fortran 90D/HPF compiler. Here we present an overview of the remainder of the thesis.

Fortran 90D/HPF Language: Chapter 2 presents the Fortran 90D/HPF language, concentrating on its strategy for expressing data parallelism and mapping data to the underlying parallel architecture. The chapter discusses a number of language issues including the crucial language features for partitioning data.

Architecture of the Compiler: Chapter 3 presents the major phases of the Fortran 90D/HPF compiler. The basic structure of the compiler is organized around seven major phases: front-end, semantic analysis of distribution directives, transformation of all parallel constructs into equivalent internal forall representations, sequentialization, building array descriptors to pass to the runtime routines, and code generation. This chapter describes some of these phases and also provides examples showing code generation for parallel statements.

Distribution Model: Chapter 4 presents methods to compile distribution directives and illustrates the important design considerations. Specifically, we show how the alignment and distribution directives can be systematically processed to produce efficient code.

Communication Model: Chapter 5 presents how the Fortran 90D/HPF compiler recognizes the presence of communication patterns in computations and generates appropriate communication calls. The chapter also describes computation partitioning, the run-time support system and the storage management methods used by the Fortran 90D/HPF compiler.

Optimization: Chapter 6 presents several optimization techniques to reduce the total cost of communication and computation. The chapter gives an example program to show the effectiveness of optimizations.

Experimental Results: Chapter 7 presents benchmark results to illustrate performance obtained using the Fortran 90D/HPF compiler. The chapter emphasizes the portability and scalability of the Fortran 90D/HPF compiler. It gives the performance results for different distributions and compares with the hand-written Fortran 77 + message passing codes.


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