University of Southampton and Chilworth Manor, Southampton, UK.
10-11 October 1995
High Performance Fortran (HPF) is an informal standard for extensions to Fortran 90 to assist its implementation on parallel computers, especially for data parallel computations. It was developed in 1992-93 by a working group comprising representatives of most parallel computer manufacturers, several compiler vendors and a number of leading academic research groups in the field of parallel computation. The HPF extensions include:
Thus the basic idea of HPF is that, by the addition of simple directives to a Fortran program it can be executed in parallel on multi-processor machines, including workstation networks and parallel computers like the Cray T3D and the IBM SP2. This method of programming is simpler, quicker, more portable and easier to maintain than programming with explicit message-passing.
A few commercial Subset HPF compilers are already available and more are imminent. Also, Southampton University High Performance Computing Centre has developed a Subset HPF compilation system, shpf, which will be made freely available for educational and academic research use. It has been designed to be widely portable. It translates HPF into standard Fortran 90 with calls to a purpose-built runtime library built on MPI (the new message-passing standard).
With the availability of HPF implementations, this seems an appropriate time to hold an HPF tutorial and workshop to increase awareness and knowledge of HPF.