Compilers and Fortran 90D

A subset of HPF has been defined to enable early availability of compilers. The first implementation of HPF is the Fortran 90D compiler being produced by the Northeast Parallel Architectures Center (NPAC) at Syracuse University. The alpha version of the compiler was demonstrated at Supercomputing 92. It supports:

• One- and two-dimensional BLOCK, CYCLIC, and BLOCK-CYCLIC data distribution
• FORALL statement
• Full run-time support for regular communications
• PARTI (ICASE) primitives for irregular communications
• A library of intrinsic functions

The beta release of the compiler is scheduled for June 1993. The compiler currently runs on MIMD parallel computers: the nCUBE/2, Intel iPSC/860, and a network of Sun workstations. The next target architecture is heterogeneous networks, and in the future the compiler will be optimized for specific architectures and released as a commercial product by the Portland Group. An example of the performance of the current Fortran 90D compiler compared to a hand-coded message passing program is shown in Fig. 3 for a Gaussian elimination problem.

 
Figure 3: Performance of the Fortran 90D compiler versus hand-written message passing code on the Intel iPSC/860 for Gaussian elimination.