SUPERB AND VIENNA-FORTRAN

Distributed-memory systems are powerful tools for solving large-scale scientific and engineering problems. However these machines are diffic ult to program since the data have to be distributed across the proces sors and message-passing operations must be inserted for communicating non-local data. In this paper, we discuss SUPERB and Vienna Fortran, two related developments with the objective of providing the user with a higher level programming paradigm while not sacrificing target code performance. The parallelization system SUPERB was developed in the G erman supercomputer project SUPRENUM from 1985 to 1989. It is based on the Single-Program-Multiple-Data (SPMD) paradigm, allows the use of g lobal addresses, and automatically inserts the necessary communication statements, given a user-supplied data distribution. SUPERB was the f irst implemented system that translated sequential Fortran 77 into exp licitly parallel message-passing Fortran. As a result of the experienc es with SUPERB and related research, the language Vienna Fortran was d esigned within the ESPRIT project GENESIS, in a joint effort of the Un iversity of Vienna and ICASE, Nasa Langley Research Center. Vienna For tran is a machine-independent language extension to Fortran, which inc ludes a broad range of features for the high-level support of advanced application development for distributed-memory multiprocessors. It ha s significantly influenced the development of High Performance Fortran , a first attempt of language standardization in this area.