In 1993 High Performance FORTRAN Forum which is a group of academicians and many leading software and hardware vendors in field of parallel processing established an informal language standard known as High Performance FORTRAN (HPF). It was based on Fortran 90 then it extended set of parallel features as well as provided extensive support for computation on distributed memory parallel computers. The standard was supported by a mainstream of vendors of parallel hardware.
HPF is a extremely appropriate language for data parallel programming models on SIMD and MIMD architecture. It permits programmers to add some compiler directives which minimize inter-process communication overhead as well as exploit load-balancing techniques.
We will not consider the complete HPF here rather we will concentrate just on augmenting features such as:
- Intrinsic Functions
- Data Distribution
- FORALL Statement
- Data Alignment
- INDEPENDENT loops
- Processor Arrangements