The rise and fall of High Performance Fortran

Abstract

High Performance Fortran (HPF) is a high-level data-parallel programming system based on Fortran. The effort to standardize HPF began in 1991, at the Supercomputing Conference in Albuquerque, where a group of industry leaders asked Ken Kennedy to lead an effort to produce a common programming language for the emerging class of distributed-memory parallel computers. The proposed language would focus on data-parallel operations in a single thread of control, a strategy which was pioneered by some earlier commercial and research systems, including Thinking Machines' CM Fortran, Fortran D, and Vienna Fortran.