A new vision for coarray Fortran

Abstract

In 1998, Numrich and Reid proposed Coarray Fortran as a simple set of extensions to Fortran 95 [7]. Their principal extension to Fortran was support for shared data known as coarrays. In 2005, the Fortran Standards Committee began exploring the addition of coarrays to Fortran 2008, which is now being finalized. Careful review of drafts of the emerging Fortran 2008 standard led us to identify several shortcomings with the proposed coarray extensions. In this paper, we briefly critique the coarray extensions proposed for Fortran 2008, outline a new vision for coarrays in Fortran language that is far more expressive, and briefly describe our strategy for implementing the language extensions that we propose.