NPAC Technical Report SCCS-488

An Overview of High Performance Computing for the Physical Sciences

Geoffrey C. Fox and Paul D. Coddington

May 1993

Published in Proc. of the Mardi Gras Conference on High Performance Computing and Its Applications in the Physical Sciences, Baton Rouge, LA (February 1993).

© Copyright World Scientific Publishing.


Abstract

We present an overview of the state of the art and future trends in high performance computing, and in particular data parallel computing. We describe recent progress in defining a standardized, portable, high level parallel language called High Performance Fortran, an extension of Fortran 90 designed for efficient implementation of data parallel applications on parallel, vector and sequential high performance computers. An outline of the language is presented, and we discuss its ability to handle different applications in computational science, concentrating on the difficulties of implementing irregular problems.


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