About High Performance Fortran

High Performance Fortran (HPF) has evolved from a long history of Fortran definitions including:

Fortran 77 - a standard definition for serial Fortran derived from the earlier Fortran 66;
Fortran 90 - a standard incorporating experience from vector computing and software engineering;
High Performance Fortran - an agreed definition incorporating experience from parallel computing systems and aimed at achieving performance thereon. The HPF Forum was initiated by Ken Kennedy at Rice University and Geoffrey Fox at Syracuse and is one of the many HPCC technologies to emerge from the Center for Research on Parallel Computation;
Subset HPF - a retrograde step, recognizing that the features called for in HPF are rather demanding on compiler technology and not immediately realizable in 1993.
The orginal HPF became HPF1 and has now evolved to HPF2. Specifications of these versions of HPF are available at the HPF Forum Collection.

Other Fortrans of note are:

Fortran M - a MIMD or Task Parallel variant of Fortran.
Vienna Fortran - Another Data Parallel variant of Fortran.

Proprietary Fortrans also feature throughout this collection, and many of the data parallel ideas for Fortran were first expressed in system specific compiler systems for the DAP, the Connection Machines, and MasPar systems, in much the same way that many of the vector features now in Fortran 90, were first made available in compilers for CRAY systems.

More information about HPF can be found at the HPF Forum and at the at the National HPCC Software Exchange.

Updated: July 23, 1998.

For further information, contact HPFA maintainers.
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