High Performance FORTRAN Handbook

by Charles H. Koelbel

Book Overview

High Performance Fortran (HPF) is a set of extensions to Fortran expressing parallel execution at a relatively high level. For the thousands of scientists, engineers, and others who wish to take advantage of the power of both vector and parallel supercomputers, five of the principal authors of HPF have teamed up here to write a tutorial for the language. There is an increasing need for a common parallel Fortran that can serve as a programming interface...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262610949
• ISBN13: 9780262610940
• Release Date: November 1993
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 345 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 8.1" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Clear and thorough

Fortran is alive and well, Java and C++ notwithstanding. It still does a lot of the heavy lifting in numerical computing of all kinds. But, in order to stay relevant, it's had to change with the high-end machines that run those computations. Fortran 90 came a long way from F77, but not far enough. It offers fair constructs for vectorizing and for loop-level parallelism in the computation. HPF does the other half of the job: it talks about the memory structures needed to put the data where the processing is, or close to it. It mentions the processors, of course, but its real value is in abstracting non-uniform memory access in terms natural to the Fortran programmer. Really using a parallel computer means coordinating the processors and memories closely; in Fortran terms, the code and the arrays that it processes. The authors do a great job of integrating HPF into F90 programming practice. This can, however, be confusing to a reader who's not already fluent in F90. If that's you, I strongly recommend an F90 reference to keep at your side while you read this. It's not for beginners, but beginners don't have the problems that supercomputers address. If performance computing is your world, then this is an outstanding resource. //wiredweird