Fortran Futures
Tony Hey
University of Southampton
This paper discusses the economics of program optimisation and some of the
challenges facing the parallel FORTRAN community. Industry takes a much
broader view of cost optimisation than just speeding up a FORTRAN application
code. Two examples of industrial "Fortran" projects undertaken by the Parallel
Applications Centre at Southampton are used to illustrate these industrial
concerns. The PROMENVIR project demonstrated the cost-effective use of a
Europe-wide metacomputer, composed of idle workstations and parallel systems
connected by a WAN, to explore the design space of an industrial
application. By contrast, the TOOLSHED project was concerned with the
integration of the design phase and grid generation phase with the simulation
phase of the industrial design cycle. Use of the STEP data interchange format
enabled the whole of the design cycle - design, simulation and visualisation -
to be optimized. The paper concludes with a discussion of three important
challenges for the continued health of parallel FORTRAN community. These are:
the multiplicity of versions of parallel FORTRAN; competition from high-level
scientific packages such as MATLAB and Mathematica;and finally, the inexorable
rise in popularity of Java-based, network-centric computing.
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