High Performance Fortran - Announcement & Request for Comments

Announcing a new version of the High Performance Fortran Language
Specification. (Finally!)




REQUEST FOR PUBLIC COMMENT ON HIGH PERFORMANCE FORTRAN




Invitation:


The High Performance Fortran Forum (HPFF), with participation from over 40
organizations, has been meeting since January 1992 to discuss and define a
set of extensions to Fortran called High Performance Fortran (HPF). Our
goal is to address the problems of writing data parallel programs for
architectures where the distribution of data impacts performance. While we
hope that the HPF extensions become widely available, HPFF is not
sanctioned or supported by any official standards organization. At this
time, HPFF invites general public review comments on the initial version
of the language draft.


The HPF language specification, version 1.0 draft, is now available. This
document contains all the technical features proposed for the language.
We plan to make minor revisions to correct errors or clarify ambiguities
in March 1993, at which time we will issue a final draft; however, we
expect that there will be few (if any) major technical changes from this
draft.


HPFF invites comments on the technical content of HPF, as well as on the
editorial presentation in the document. To facilitate incorporation of
comments into the final document, we ask that comments be sent before
March 1, 1993.


How to Get the Documents:


Electronic copies of the HPF language specification are available from
numerous sources.


        Anonymous FTP sources: Directory:
        titan.cs.rice.edu public/HPFF/draft
        think.com public/HPFF
        ftp.gmd.de hpf-europe
        theory.tc.cornell.edu pub
        minerva.npac.syr.edu public


        Email sources: First line of message:
        netlib@research.att.com send hpf-v10.ps from hpff
        netlib@ornl.gov send hpf-v10.ps from hpf
        softlib@cs.rice.edu send hpf-v10.ps


The following formats are available. Note that not all formats are
available from all sources.
        hpf-v10.dvi DVI file
        hpf-v10.ps Postscript
        hpf-v10.ps.Z Compressed Postscript
        hpf-v10.tar Tar file of LaTeX version
        hpf-v10.tar.Z Compressed tar file


For more detailed instructions, send email to hpff-info@cs.rice.edu. This
will return a message with expanded detail about accessing the above
document sources, as well as other information about HPFF.


We strongly encourage reviewers to obtain an electronic copy of the
document. However, if electronic access is impossible the draft is also
available in hard copy form as CRPC Technical Report #92225. This report
is available for $50 (copying/handling fee) from:


        Theresa Chatman
        CITI/CRPC, Box 1892
        Rice University
        Houston, TX 77251


Make checks payable to Rice University. This document will be sent surface
mail unless additional airmail postage is included in the payment.




How to Submit Comments:


HPFF encourages reviewers to submit comments as soon as possible, with a
deadline of February 15 for consideration. Please do not submit comments
for any version of the draft earlier than the 0.4 version.


Please send comments by email to hpff-comments@cs.rice.edu. To facilitate
the processing of comments we request that separate comment messages be
submitted for each chapter of the document and that the chapter be clearly
identified in the "Subject:" line of the message. Comments about general
overall impressions of the HPF document should be labeled as Chapter 1.
All comments on the language specification become the property of Rice
University.


If email access is impossible for comment responses, hard copy may be sent
to


        HPF Comments
        c/o Theresa Chatman
        CITI/CRPC, Box 1892
        Rice University
        Houston, TX 77251


HPFF plans to process the feedback received at a meeting in March. Best
efforts will be made to reply to comments submitted.




Sincerely,


Charles Koelbel
Rice University
HPFF Executive Director


Version History
===============


Version 0.1:
August 14, 1992
EXTREMELY preliminary version.


First collection of the proposals active in the High Performance Fortran
Forum. Established much of the outline for later documents, and
represented most decisions made through the July HPFF meeting.




Version 0.2:
September 9, 1992
Version discussed at the September 10-11 HPFF meeting


Changes:
General cleaning up of version 0.1.
Inclusion of most new proposals at that time.




Version 0.3:
October 12, 1992
Version discussed at the October 22-23 HPFF meeting


Changes:
Numerous minor and major changes due to discussions at the September meeting.
Added a section on "Model of Computation".
Presented alternate chapters for data distribution with and without
templates.
Added two proposals for ON clauses specifying where computation is to
be executed.
Added distribution inquiry intrinsics.
Total rewrite of I/O material, sending most previous material to the
Journal of Development.




Version 0.4:
November 6, 1992
Version to be presented at Supercomputing '92


Changes:
Numerous minor and major changes due to discussions at the October
meeting.
"Acknowledgements" section now much more accurate.
"The HPF Model" (replacing "Model of Computation") substantially
simplified and improved.
"Distribution without Templates" chapter removed.
Many proposals not adopted moved to "Journal of Development".




Version 1.0:
January 25, 1993
Draft final version


Changes:
Many changes for clarity or pedagogical reasons.
The examples in several sections have been significantly enlarged.
INHERIT (for dummy arguments) added to distribution chapter.
Pure procedures may now have dummy arguments with explicit
distributions, if those distributions are inherited from the caller.
Changed the names of the new reductions AND, OR, and EOR to IALL,
IANY, and IPARITY.
Clarified the status of the character array language to be not in the
subset, and as a result, removed the character array intrinsics. Only
very restricted forms of alignment subscript expressions (of the form
\(m*i + n\) where \(m\) and \(n\) are integer expressions) are part of the
subset. [Bibliography] Correctly spelled ``Mehrotra'' and ``Gerndt''.
--

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