Degenerate Conic

Algorithms • Modern Fortran Programming • Orbital Mechanics

Aug 27, 2015

Coarray Fortran in Action

Hey, there's an article on the internet that mentions Coarray Fortran (introduced in the Fortran 2008 standard), and how it is the right tool for a particular massive computational job. It doesn't mention punchcards, the 1950s, or express any surprise that people are still using Fortran in modern times. Progress?

Excerpt:

Applications such as ECMWF's IFS model use OpenMP (a standard for shared memory parallelization) for computations on the nodes and MPI for communications across the nodes. Generally, this arrangement works well for many applications, but for high-resolution weather modeling using the spectral transform method, it can bog down the application, wasting precious runtime—it simply does not easily allow for any overlap of computation and communication. The use of coarrays (also called PGAS, for Partitioned Global Address Space) in Fortran, however, allows a simple syntax for data to be communicated between tasks at the same time computations are being performed.

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