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Goals and Scope of High Performance Fortran

The goals of HPF, as defined at an early HPFF meeting, were to define language extensions and feature selection for Fortran supporting:

The FORALL construct and several new intrinsic functions were designed primarily to meet the first goal, while the data distribution features and some other directives are targeted toward the second goal. Extrinsic procedures allow access to low-level programming in support of the third goal, although performance tuning using the other features is also possible.

A number of subsidiary goals were also established:

These goals were quite aggressive when they were adopted in March 1992, and led to a number of compromises in the final language. In particular, support for explicit MIMD computation, message-passing, and synchronization was limited due to the difficulty in forming a consensus among the participants. We hope that future efforts will address these important issues.



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Thu Dec 8 16:17:11 CST 1994