How to Get the High-Performance Fortran Specification

The most recent draft of the High-Performance Fortran Language Specification is version 1.0 Draft, dated May 24, 1993. See "Version History" below for a description of the changes.

How to Get the High-Performance Fortran Language Specification

There are three ways to get a copy of the draft:

1. Anonymous FTP: The most recent draft is available on titan.cs.rice.edu in the directory public/HPFF/draft. Several files are kept there, including compressed Postscript files of previous versions of the draft. The most current version of this draft is 0.4, which can be retrieved as a tar file containing LaTeX source (hpf-v10-final.tar) or in Postscript format (hpf-v10-final.ps); both of these are also available as compressed files. Several other sites also have the draft available in one or more formats, including think.com, ftp.gmd.de, theory.tc.cornell.edu, and minerva.npac.syr.edu.

2. Electronic mail: The most recent draft is available from the Softlib server at Rice University. This can be accessed in two ways: A. Send electronic mail to softlib@cs.rice.edu with "send hpf-v10-final.ps" in the message body. The report is sent as a Postscript file. B. Send electronic mail to softlib@cs.rice.edu with "send hpf-v10-final.tar.Z" in the message body. The report is sent as a uuencodeded compressed tar file containing LaTeX source. C. Send electronic mail to netlib@ornl.gov with "send hpf-v10-final.ps from hpf" in the message body. The report is sent as a Postscript file. This site also has the LaTeX source of the draft; use "send index from hpf" to see the file names. D. Send electronic mail to netlib@research.att.com with "send hpf-v10-final.ps from hpff" in the message body. The report is sent as a Postscript file. (In all cases, the reply is sent as several messages to avoid mailer restrictions; edit the message bodies together to obtain the whole file.) The same files can be obtained from David Loveman (loveman@mpsg.enet.dec.com ) and Chuck Koelbel (chk@cs.rice.edu ), but replies will take longer because real people have to answer the mail.

3. Hardcopy: The most recent draft is available as technical report CRPC-TR 92225 from the Center for Research on Parallel Computation at Rice University. Send requests to: Theresa Chatman CITI/CRPC, Box 1892 Rice University Houston, TX 77251 There is a charge of $50.00 for this report to cover copying and mailing costs.

Disclaimers ===========

A few caveats about the HPF draft:

A. The current version contains some material that is still under active discussion. Changes will be fairly frequent until at least December 1992. New versions will be announced on the HPFF mailing list and in the newsgroups comp.parallel, comp.lang.misc, and comp.lang.fortran.

B. The HPF Language Specification does not necessarily represent the official view of any individual, company, university, government, or other agency.

C. Please address any questions, comments, or possible inconsistencies in the draft to hpff-comments@cs.rice.edu . Include the chapter number you are commenting on in the "Subject:" line of the message.

Version History ===============

Version 0.1: August 14, 1992 EXTREMELY preliminary version.

First collection of the proposals active in the High-Performance Fortran Forum. Established much of the outline for later documents, and represented most decisions made through the July HPFF meeting.

Version 0.2: September 9, 1992 Version discussed at the September 10-11 HPFF meeting

Changes: General cleaning up of version 0.1. Inclusion of most new proposals at that time.

Version 0.3: October 12, 1992 Version discussed at the October 22-23 HPFF meeting

Changes: Numerous minor and major changes due to discussions at the September meeting. Added a section on "Model of Computation". Presented alternate chapters for data distribution with and without templates. Added two proposals for ON clauses specifying where computation is to be executed. Added distribution inquiry intrinsics. Total rewrite of I/O material, sending most previous material to the Journal of Development.

Version 0.4: November 6, 1992 Version to be presented at Supercomputing '92

Changes: Numerous minor and major changes due to discussions at the October meeting. "Acknowledgements" section now much more accurate. "The HPF Model" (replacing "Model of Computation") substantially simplified and improved. "Distribution without Templates" chapter removed. Many proposals not adopted moved to Journal of Development.

Version 1.0: January 25, 1993 Draft final version

Changes: Many changes for clarity or pedagogical reasons. The examples in several sections have been significantly enlarged. INHERIT (for dummy arguments) added to distribution chapter. Pure procedures may now have dummy arguments with explicit distributions, if those distributions are inherited from the caller. Changed the names of the new reductions AND, OR, and EOR to IALL, IANY, and IPARITY. Clarified the status of the character array language to be not in the subset, and as a result, removed the character array intrinsics. Only very restricted forms of alignment subscript expressions (of the form $m*i + n$ where $m$ and $n$ are integer expressions) are part of the subset. [Bibliography] Correctly spelled "Mehrotra" and "Gerndt."

Version 1.0 final: May 24, 1993 Final version

Changes: Better formatting of commentary material, more cross-referencing, and better explanations of various features throughout. Split Journal of Development out to another document. Fixed syntax to be unambiguous in the presence of insignificant blanks. Eliminated VIEW directive. Generalized alignment subscript forms somewhat. Made PURE a first-class attribute, rather than a directive. Allowed some forms of ALIGN in PURE procedures. Made EXTRINSIC a first-class attribute, rather than a directive. Eliminated the parallel I/O chapter.

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