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Thursday Feb 07, 2008

Building with Fortress

Fortress 1.0, Sun's new programming language for high-performance computing, is all about opening up scientific domains for writing code – domains that have previously been inaccessible to the average programmer. Dr. Eric Allen, principal investigator in the Programming Language Research Group at Sun Labs, joins Hal Stern on this latest edition of Innovating@Sun to elucidate the features and benefits of Fortress. Allen and Stern discuss:

  • Fortress' design focused on high programmer productivity
  • Innovative features including syntax and parallelism and why these will be useful for targeting multi-core architectures as well as super computers
  • How the mathematical notation in Fortress decreases the space between what the specification of a program looks like and what the corresponding code looks like, thereby reducing errors
  • Dynamic compilation and designating optimizations you want the compiler to make
  • Why much of the language is put into the libraries
  • Dimension checking and the typing system
  • Why transactions are built into the core of Fortress
  • Balancing the need for correctness vs. allowing the developer to go back and make fixes vs. being fast and scalable
  • Open source, communities and getting Fortress into the hands of developers

    Listen to the entire podcast to hear why Sun sees Fortress as its best attempt to design a programming model that meets the needs of the 21st century programmer in terms of multi-core architectures and parallelism requirements.

    Links:



    Transcript
    Project Fortress

    • Posted at 01:32PM Feb 07, 2008 by Laura Ventura in Sun [permalink] Comments [0]

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