VIENNA-FORTRAN AND THE PATH TOWARDS A STANDARD PARALLEL LANGUAGE

Highly parallel scalable multiprocessing systems (HMPs) are powerful t ools for solving large-scale scientific and engineering problems. Howe ver, these machines are difficult to program since algorithms must exp loit locality in order to achieve high performance. Vienna Fortran was the first fully specified data-parallel language for HMPs that provid ed features for the specification of data distribution and alignment a t a high level of abstraction. In this paper we outline the major elem ents of Vienna Fortran and compare it to High Performance Fortran (HPF ), a de-facto standard in this area. A significant weakness of HPF is its lack of support for many advanced applications, which require irre gular data distributions and dynamic load balancing. We introduce HPF, an extension of HPF based on Vienna Fortran, that provides the requi red functionality.