HPF USERS GIVE INPUT AT FEBRUARY MEETING

More than 75 current and potential HPF users shared ideas and got up-to- date information about the language's implementations and future directions at the first annual High Performance Fortran (HPF) User Group Meeting, held February 24 through 26 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Sponsored by the CRPC, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and several vendors, the meeting included 26 invited and contributed talks by HPF users and developers, a panel session to inform vendors of user needs, poster sessions, and group discussions. Two tutorials before the meeting introduced participants to HPF in practice, and the recently finalized HPF 2.0 (see Fall 1996 Parallel Computing Research, page 9).

HPF user group discussions resulted in decisions to set up local HPF user groups worldwide, review and update HPF web pages, set up a usenet group, and award prizes for HPF programming. A survey was distributed to determine the most desirable, as-yet unimplemented HPF features. The most common requests were for full Fortran 90 support, tools, math libraries, HPF_LOCAL, a full efficient HPF 2.0 core, effective EXTRINSIC interface, and an efficient HPF_LIBRARY.

Sponsoring vendors included The Portland Group; the Convex Division of Hewlett-Packard; Espirit, the European Union Information Technologies Program; and Digital Equipment Corporation. For additional details about the meeting, including the papers presented and the survey results, see http://www.crpc.rice.edu/HPFF/home.html . Information about the next HPF User Group Meeting, scheduled for early 1998 in Europe, will be posted on this web page.

Table of Contents