Final Report, Center for Programming Models for Scalable Parallel Computing: Co-Array Fortran, Grant Number DE-FC02-01ER25505

Abstract

The major accomplishment of this project is the production of CafLib, an 'object-oriented' parallel numerical library written in Co-Array Fortran. CafLib contains distributed objects such as block vectors and block matrices along with procedures, attached to each object, that perform basic linear algebra operations such as matrix multiplication, matrix transpose and LU decomposition. It also contains constructors and destructors for each object that hide the details of data decomposition from the programmer, and it contains collective operations that allow the programmer to calculate global reductions, such as global sums, global minima and global maxima, as well as vector and matrix norms of several kinds. CafLib is designed to be extensible in such a way that programmers can define distributed grid and field objects, based on vector and matrix objects from the library, for finite difference algorithms to solve partial differential equations. A very important extra benefit that resulted from the project is the inclusion of the co-array programming model in the next Fortran standard called Fortran 2008. It is the first parallel programming model ever included as a standard part of the language. Co-arrays will be a supported feature in all Fortran compilers, and the portability provided by standardization will encourage a large number of programmers to adopt it for new parallel application development. The combination of object-oriented programming in Fortran 2003 with co-arrays in Fortran 2008 provides a very powerful programming model for high-performance scientific computing. Additional benefits from the project, beyond the original goal, include a programto provide access to the co-array model through access to the Cray compiler as a resource for teaching and research. Several academics, for the first time, included the co-array model as a topic in their courses on parallel computing. A separate collaborative project with LANL and PNNL showed how to extend the co-array model to other languages in a small experimental version of Co-array Python. Another collaborative project defined a Fortran 95 interface to ARMCI to encourage Fortran programmers to use the one-sided communication model in anticipation of their conversion to the co-array model later. A collaborative project with the Earth Sciences community at NASA Goddard and GFDL experimented with the co-array model within computational kernels related to their climate models, first using CafLib and then extending the co-array model to use design patterns. Future work will build on the design-pattern idea with a redesign of CafLib as a true object-oriented library using Fortran 2003 and as a parallel numerical library using Fortran 2008.