Parallel Programming in Fortress

Abstract

The computing world is currently undergoing dramatic changes. More powerful computers have brought high-performance computing (HPC), an endeavor historically relegated to national labs and government institutions, to the mainstream. At the same time, microchip manufacturers are designing new chips that contain increasing numbers of cores on a single chip to improve performance. Yet unfortunately, modern programming languages are ill-equipped for these changes. Most languages do not directly support any notion of parallelism and even languages with support for parallelism, such as the Java Programming Language, support only course-grained notions of parallelism, best suited for tasks such as networking and GUI programming. Fortress is a new programming language designed for HPC with high programmability.

It provides mathematical syntax to enable scientists and engineers to write programs in a notation they are accostomed to. It also provides built-in support for parallel programming. Fortress is designed for growth by community participation and development and its syntax and semantics have been formally designed and specified. This tutorial will introduce Project Fortress, which is an open-source project with a reference implementation of the Fortress programming language. Anyone who works on scientific programming, parallel programming, quality-critical software development, or open-source projects will find this tutorial of interest.

Short bio

Resources

• talk slide 1
• talk slide 2