In 1993 the High Performance Fortran Forum, a league of many
leading industrial and academic groups in the field of parallel
processing, established an informal language standard, called
High Performance Fortran (HPF) [22,28]. HPF is an
extension of Fortan 90 to support the data parallel programming model
on distributed memory parallel computers. The standard of HPF
was supported by many manufactures of parallel hardware, such as Cray,
DEC, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Intel, Maspar, Meiko, nCube, Sun, and Thinking
Machines. Several companies broadcast their goal to develop HPF
implementations, including ACE, APR, KAI, Lahey, NA Software,
Portland, and PSR.
Since then, except a few vendors like Portland, many of those
still in business have given up their HPF projects. The goals of HPF
were immensely aspiring, and perhaps attempted to put
too many ideas into one language. Nevertheless, we think that many
of the originally defined goals for HPF standardization of a
distributed data model for SPMD computing are important.