Fortran + LLVM
Good news everyone! The US government just announced that it has reached an agreement with NVIDIA to produce an open source Fortran front-end for the LLVM compiler infrastructure. It will be based on the existing commercial Portland Group compiler (NVIDIA purchased the Portland Group a couple of years ago). Source code for the Fortran front-end is expected to be available in late 2016. From the announcement:
The project is being spearheaded by the Lawrence Livermore, Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories in response to the need for a robust open-source Fortran solution to complement and support the burgeoning use of LLVM and the CLANG C++ compiler in the HPC community. Large HPC applications, such as those developed by the NNSA Laboratories, are often built on mixed-language modules, and require a common compiler infrastructure that supports both C/C++ and Fortran. Fortran also remains widely used in the broader scientific computing community, supporting simulation science to advance national security, medicine, energy, climate and basic science missions.
Does Fortran support for LLVM mean that we'll eventually be able to have Fortran code running on our iPads? Only time will tell...
See also
- NNSA, national labs team with Nvidia to develop open-source Fortran compiler technology, Nov. 13, 2015 [Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory]
- NVIDIA Pushes Further Into High Performance Computing With Portland Group Acquisition, Jul. 29, 2013 [NVIDIA]