Object oriented Fortran for development of portable parallel programs

Parallel programming has to date remained inaccessible to the average scientific programmer. Parallel programming languages are generally foreign to most scientific applications programmers who only speak Fortran. Automatic parallelization techniques have so far proved unsuccessful in extracting large amounts of parallelism from sequential codes and do not encourage development of new, inherently parallel algorithms. In addition, there is a lack of consistency of programmer interface across architectures which requires programmers to invest a lot of effort in porting code from one parallel machine to another. This paper discusses the object oriented Fortran language and support routines developed at Mississippi State in support of parallelizing complex field simulations. This interface is based on Fortran to ease its acceptance by scientific programmers and is implemented on top of the Unix operating system for portability