The parallel Fortran family and a new perspective

Abstract

Various parallel Fortran languages have been developed over the years. The research work in creating this Parallel Fortran Family has made significant contributions to parallel programming language design and implementation. In this paper, various parallel Fortran languages are studied based on a uniform co-ordination approach towards parallel programming. That is, new language constructs in parallel Fortran systems are regarded as providing a co-ordination mechanism organising a set of single-threaded computations, coded in standard Fortran, into a parallel ensemble. Features of different parallel Fortran languages are studied by investigating their corresponding co-ordination models. A new perspective on designing a structured parallel Fortran system is proposed by using a generic structured co-ordination language, SCL, as the uniform means to organise parallel Fortran computation.