Towards a portable environment for FORTRAN applications on parallel computers

Summary

This paper extends the communicating sequential process model of communications on multicomputers to a virtual machine interface with skeleton algorithms for global communication of data. The software is constructed using elements of object-oriented programming. Data is divided into two types of variables: those stored locally to each process and those accessible globally. Transfer of data between processes is implicit in the library structure, providing opportunities for optimisation.

The application-level interface currently resembles a vector linear algebra library. Generic communication skeletons are defined for building libraries specific to applications; they illustrate more general programming issues. An example from a wave-scattering algorithm is given.