A multi-platform co-array Fortran compiler

Co-array Fortran (CAF) - a small set of extensions to Fortran 90 - is an emerging model for scalable, global address space parallel programming. CAF´s global address space programming model simplifies the development of single-program-multiple-data parallel programs by shifting the burden for managing the details of communication from developers to compilers. This paper describes CAFC - a prototype implementation of an open-source, multiplatform CAF compiler that generates code well-suited for today´s commodity clusters. The CAFC compiler translates CAF into Fortran 90 plus calls to one-sided communication primitives. The paper describes key details of CAFC´s approach to generating efficient code for multiple platforms. Experiments compare the performance of CAF and MPI versions of several NAS parallel benchmarks on an Alpha cluster with a Quadrics interconnect, an Itanium 2 cluster with a Myrinet 2000 interconnect and an Itanium 2 cluster with a Quadrics interconnect. These experiments show that CAFC compiles CAF programs into code that delivers performance roughly equal to that of hand-optimized MPI programs.