Re: should I be interested in ada?

[William Clodius <wclodius@lanl.gov>]

Nick Roberts wrote:
> <snip>
> Surely this is a wee bit of an exaggeration? The majority of targets for
> Fortran compilers are single-processor. I would be amazed if the majority of
> Fortran compilers available today, commercially or not, were parallelising.
> I am aware that there are a number of Fortran compilers which parallelise,
> and have been for many years, but all but one, I believe, only do it for a
> specific, fairly esoteric target (Crays etc.), thus not being likely, I
> assume, to be useful to astrologers in general.
> <snip>

There are roughly four groups of Fortran compiler "vendors":

1. Those sold by the system vendors: IBM, Sun, Compaq/DEC, SGI/Cray, HP,
Fujitsu, etc. These sell both single processor and multiprocessor
systems. While most of the systems sold are single or dual processor,
they always have multiprocessor compilation options for their compilers,
otherwise they couldn't sell their high end systems.

2. Independent vendors that address a large variety of systems: e.g.,
EPC, Portland group, Pacific-Sierra, and NAG. These often also go after
the high end, which means parallelization options.

3. Independent vendors that target the low end of the market, e.g.,
Lahey, Absoft, and Salford. In the past these have not had
parallelization options, but with the popuarity of dual processor, and
networked processors they are implementing them.

4. Academics that have often focused on parallelization.

A lot of the focus on Fortran parallelization has been on HPF (High
performance Fortran). Most implementors of these compilers have
parallelization features.

http://www.crpc.rice.edu/HPFF/compilers/index.html

-- 

William B. Clodius		Phone: (505)-665-9370
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