High Performance Fortran

Fortran-90, its basis in Fortran-77, its implications for parallel machines, and the extensions developed for it by the High Performance Fortran Forum (HPFF), a coalition of computer vendors, government laboratories, and academic groups founded in 1992 to improve the performance and usability of Fortran-90 for computationally intensive applications on a wide variety of machines, including massively parallel single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) and multiple-instruction multiple-data (MIMD) systems and vector processors, are discussed. SIMD and MIMD systems, previous attempts to develop languages for them, the genesis of the HPFF, how the group actually worked, and the HPF programming model are described.