Sunday July 20, 2008 Sun's Fortress Language: Parallelism by Default
Michael Feldman over at HPC Wire writes on Sun's Fortress parallel programming language:
"If anyone knows how to introduce a new programming language, it's Sun Microsystems. The company's highly successful Java language, which was introduced in 1991, has become ubiquitous in network-centric and embedded computing. Today, there's a whole research team at Sun Labs devoted to programming languages, and the big project there in recent years has been the development of the Fortress programming language. The end game is to "do for Fortran what Java did for C."
Unlike Java though, Fortress is geared for HPC applications, with programmability as a major design goal. The language maintains a high level of abstraction for the developer, allowing the focus to be on the algorithm rather than the underlying hardware. And even though Fortress specifically targets high-end technical computing, it is also applicable to large-scale parallel applications of almost any type. "We were looking for a language that was good for multicore, for supercomputing, and for everything in between," explains Eric Allen, Principal Investigator of Programming Languages Research Group at Sun Labs. Full Story
Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( July 20, 2008 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [1]
Long ago the plea was "someone needs to do for Fortran what Java did for C++" how did this get mutated into what Java did for C?
Posted by Keith Bierman on July 24, 2008 at 01:22 PM PDT #