High Performance FORTRAN Handbook

Fortran is alive and well, Java and C++ notwithstanding. It still does a lot of the heavy lifting in numerical computing of all kinds. But, in order to stay relevant, it's had to change with the high-end machines that run those computations. Fortran 90 came a long way from F77, but not far enough. It offers fair constructs for vectorizing and for loop-level parallelism in the computation. HPF does the other half of the job: it talks about the memory structures needed to put the data where the processing is, or close to it. It mentions the processors, of course, but its real value is in abstracting non-uniform memory access in terms natural to the Fortran programmer. Really using a parallel computer means coordinating the processors and memories closely; in Fortran terms, the code and the arrays that it processes. The authors do a great job of integrating HPF into F90 programming practice. This can, however, be confusing to a reader who's not already fluent in F90. If that's you, I strongly recommend an F90 reference to keep at your side while you read this. It's not for beginners, but beginners don't have the problems that supercomputers address. If performance computing is your world, then this is an outstanding resource. //wiredweird