Monday June 25, 2007

Hans Eberle presented a Sun Labs perspective on High Performance Computing at the HPC Consortium meeting in Dresden today. He gave overviews of a few of the current projects running in Sun Labs that are relevant to HPC, including proximity interconnect and Fortress. For a complete list of Sun Labs project, visit the Sun Labs project page.

Fortress has been designed specifically as a language for expressing scientific applications. Its design principles included support for a mathematical notation, growability, safety, and implicit parallelism. Here is an example of Fortress code formatted using a set of Emacs macros supplied with Fortress:

While the above may look strange to the average programmer, think how strange C or Fortran code looks to a scientist trying to solve a complex set of equations in their domain of expertise. Or actually, meditate on the fact that we as an industry have beaten these poor scientists into submission and forced them to express their problems in something so foreign to them as current programming languages. A bug perhaps?

Unlike most languages that begin as serial languages and then add features or annotations to express parallelism, Fortress was designed specifically with parallelism built in as is illustrated on the slide below.

A Fortress interpreter has been released under open source and an open source community has been established to further develop the code. The web site is here. If you are interested, the Fortress language specification can be found here.