Enlarging the scope of vector-based computations: extending Fortran 90 by nested data parallelism

Author

Au, K.T.P. ; Chakravarty, M.M.T. ; Darlington, J. ; Guo, Y. ; Jahnichen, S. ; Köhler, M. ; Keller, G. ; Pfannenstiel, W. ; Simons, M.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput., Imperial Coll. of Sci., Technol. & Med., London, UK

fYear

1997

fDate

19-21 Mar 1997

Firstpage

66

Lastpage

73

Abstract

This paper describes the integration of nested data parallelism into Fortran 90. Unlike flat data parallelism, nested data parallelism directly provides means for handling irregular data structures and certain forms of control parallelism, such as divide-and-conquer algorithms thus enabling the programmer to express such algorithms far more naturally. Existing work deals with nested data parallelism in a functional environment, which does help avoid a set of problems, but makes efficient implementations more complicated. Moreover functional languages are not readily accepted by programmers used to languages such as Fortran and C, which are currently predominant in programming parallel machines. In this paper, we introduce the imperative data-parallel language Fortran 90V and give an overview of its implementation

Keywords

FORTRAN; data structures; parallel languages; Fortran 90; control parallelism; divide-and-conquer algorithms; irregular data structures; nested data parallelism; Computer architecture; Computer languages; Concurrent computing; Data structures; Educational institutions; Gold; Libraries; Parallel processing; Parallel programming; Program processors;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Advances in Parallel and Distributed Computing, 1997. Proceedings

Conference_Location

Shanghai

Print_ISBN

0-8186-7876-3

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/APDC.1997.574015

Filename

574015