Fortran 90 is the actual standard in term of data-parallel language
for scientific computing. In order to develop a data-parallel
algorithm on a distributed memory machine, programmers dispose of the
High Performance Fortran extension of Fortran 90 which integrates
directives for data mapping. A such data-parallel algorithm designer
usually starts from a Fortran 90 code and inserts HPF directives in
respect with the HPF syntactic rules. Effects of these directives are
essential in the balance between the parallelism and the
communications.
The programmer has to insert by hand all the mapping directives. Therefore the scientific programmer must learn a third generation dialect of Fortran to take advantage of parallel machines.
Like Fortran 90, HPF supports regular data structures (multi-dimensional arrays). Furthermore, HPF provides a geometrical support to express the distribution of data among the processors (grid of processors). The expression of parallelism at the data level allows the programmer to have a visual perception of the distribution of data in space (at least for 1, 2 and 3-dimensional arrays and grids). Often programmers use papers and colour pencils to draw and improve their mapping before translating the drawing to HPF directives. HPF-Builder is a tool to help the programmer at this level. It proposes to replace the paper and pencils by a screen and mouse. Then HPF-Builder automatically generates the HPF directives from the drawing.
HPF-Builder graphical environment frees the programmer from all the syntactic constraints due to the data mapping.
HPF-Builder respects the hierarchical HPF programming model. For each level, HPF-Builder provides a graphical interactive editor. In a WYSIWYG way each editor is able to generate the appropriate directives according to the data manipulation of the programmer.
Some snaps of current version
Download
Or directly get the binaries:
Just untar the file, get the runner script and run it.
HPF-Builder: A visual environment to transform Fortran 90 codes to HPF, International Journal of Supercomputing Applications and High Performance Computing, Summer 1997, 11(2):95--102.
Step by step transformation of a Fortran 90 program to HPF, using HPF-Builder, Eighth SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing, Minneapolis, Minnesota, March 1997.
Visualisation of HPF
data mappings and of their communication cost, VecPar'98, Porto,
Portugal, June 1998.