From: chk@rice.edu (Charles Koelbel)
Subject: Welcome to HPFF
Originator: chk@erato.cs.rice.edu
Keywords: HPFF, High Performance Fortran
Reply-To: chk@rice.edu (Charles Koelbel)
Organization: Rice University
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 23:33:11 GMT


Welcome to the High Performance Fortran Forum!


WHAT IS HPFF?
=============

Since its introduction over three decades ago, Fortran has been the
language of choice for scientific programming for sequential
computers.  Exploiting the full capability of modern architectures,
however, increasingly requires more information than ordinary Fortran
77 or Fortran 90 programs provide.  This information applies to such
areas as

    1. Opportunities for parallel execution
    2. Type of available parallelism - MIMD, SIMD, or some combination
    3. Allocation of data among individual processor memories
    4. Placement of data within a single processor

The High Performance Fortran Forum is a coalition of industrial and
academic groups working to identify the basic issues and suggest a set
of standard extensions to Fortran to provide the necessary
information.  To date, the group includes most vendors currently
delivering parallel machines, government labs, and many university
research groups.  Our intent is to develop extensions to Fortran which
provide support for high performance programming on a wide variety of
machines, including massively parallel SIMD and MIMD systems and
vector processors.  Some of the topics considered will be

	1. Data distribution and alignment
	2. Explicit parallelism, particularly for data-parallel problems
	3. Computation distribution
	4. I/O support

The result of this project will be an industry-wide standard
language portable from workstations to massively parallel
supercomputers.  Furthermore, the language will be able to express the
algorithms needed to achieve high performance on specific
architectures in this range.

Anybody with an interest in using Fortran on modern architectures is
welcome to participate in HPFF.  In particular, we welcome comments
from

	1. Fortran users writing new applications for modern architectures
	2. Fortran users porting programs to new architectures
	3. Fortran compiler and programming environment implementors
	4. Researchers interested in extending Fortran

To allow wide participation, all HPFF materials will be available
electronically, and we welcome electronic comments (send mail to
chk@rice.edu).


WHERE CAN I GET MORE INFORMATION ON HPFF?

Electronic copies of HPFF draft proposals, minutes of the working
group meetings, and other related documents are available by anonymous
FTP from titan.cs.rice.edu.  To get these, follow the following script
(things you type are underscored with ^):

	% ftp titan.cs.rice.edu
	  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
	Connected to cs.rice.edu.
	220 titan FTP server (SunOS 4.1) ready.
	Name (titan.cs.rice.edu:chk): anonymous
	                              ^^^^^^^^^
	331 Guest login ok, send ident as password.
	Password: your name
	          ^^^^^^^^^
	230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply.
	ftp> cd public/HPFF
	     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
	250 CWD command successful.
	ftp> ls
	     ^^
	200 PORT command successful.
	150 ASCII data connection for /bin/ls (128.42.1.69,1831) (0 bytes).
	README
	announce
	announce.tex
	fd-over.shar
	fd-over.shar.Z
	fd.shar
	fd.shar.Z
	mpp.ps
	mpp.ps.Z
	226 ASCII Transfer complete.
	100 bytes received in 1.8 seconds (0.054 Kbytes/s)
	ftp> get README
	     ^^^^^^^^^^
	200 PORT command successful.
	150 ASCII data connection for README (128.42.1.69,1832) (1014 bytes).
	226 ASCII Transfer complete.
	local: README remote: README
	1034 bytes received in 0.14 seconds (7.1 Kbytes/s)
	ftp> quit
	     ^^^^
	221 Goodbye.

README lists the files which will reside in this directory; it changes
regularly to reflect new additions.  Use it as a guide to deciding
which documents you want.



HOW CAN I PARTICIPATE IN HPFF? 

One way to participate is to attend the HPFF working group meetings.
To try to ensure productive meetings, we ask that working group
attendees make a commitment to attend at least half of the meetings.
Also, at most 2 participants from each company/school/laboratory are
allowed.  Contact Ann Redelfs (redelfs@rice.edu) for more information
about the working group.

An easier way to participate is to join one or more of the HPFF
mailing lists.  The possible lists are
	hpff			Main HPFF list (meeting minutes,
				pointers to language drafts,
				miscellaneous announcements)
	hpff-f90		Discussion group for the relationship
				between HPF and Fortran 90
	hpff-distribute		Discussion group for models of data
				and work distribution
	hpff-subroutines	Discussion group for subroutine
				interfaces and automatic redistribution
	hpff-forall		Discussion group for FORALL
				statements, local subroutines, and
				explicit process control
	hpff-io			Discussion of parallel I/O and other
				miscellaneous matters
	hpff-intrinsics		Discussion of new intrinsic functions
				useful for parallel programming
All mailing lists are kept at cs.rice.edu.

To add your mail address to one of the HPFF mailing lists, mail a
message to hpff-request@cs.rice.edu with a subject line containing the
word "add" and the name of the list.  This will add the E-mail address
of the message originator to the requested mailing list (if no list
name is given, the address is added to "hpff").  For example, to
receive the Fortran 90 discussions, send a message with "Subject: add
hpff-f90".