Developments in Supercomputer Languages

Abstract

Concurrent languages, such as Ada and Pascal Plus, have been designed and implemented for configurations which consist of a number of independent and concurrently operating processors. The development of languages for programming array and vector processors has proceeded independently and produced variants of Fortran for representing this type of parallel processing. However, the latest hardware configurations contain both types of parallelism, for example, the Cray X-MP contains several vector processors which are capable of acting independently and in parallel. It is appropriate with the introduction of these new configurations to consider the design of a language capable of handling both types of parallelism. Such a proposal is considered in this article.