SUPERB and Vienna Fortran

Distributed-memory systems are powerful tools for solving large-scale scientific and engineering problems. However these machines are difficult to program since the data have to be distributed across the processors and message-passing operations must be inserted for communicating non-local data. In this paper, we discuss SUPERB and Vienna Fortran, two related developments with the objective of providing the user with a higher level programming paradigm while not sacrificing target code performance. The parallelization system SUPERB was developed in the German supercomputer project SUPRENUM from 1985 to 1989. It is based on the Single-Program-Multiple-Data (SPMD) paradigm, allows the use of global addresses, and automatically inserts the necessary communication statements, given a user-supplied data distribution. SUPERB was the first implemented system that translated sequential Fortran 77 into explicitly parallel message-passing Fortran. As a result of the experiences with SUPERB and related research, the language Vienna Fortran was designed within the ESPRIT project GENESIS, in a joint effort of the University of Vienna and ICASE, Nasa Langley Research Center. Vienna Fortran is a machine-independent language extension to Fortran, which includes a broad range of features for the high-level support of advanced application development for distributed-memory multiprocessors. It has significantly influenced the development of High Performance Fortran, a first attempt of language standardization in this area.