The view from the high end fortran, parallelism and the HECToR service

Abstract

Since its inception in 1956 Fortran, and indeed FORTRAN, has been the computational language of science and engineering. Through Fortran aeroplanes fly, drugs are designed and nuclear reactors react. But though codes from the original manual still look familiar [1] Fortran itself has changed much over the last half century and more. So how is it currently being used on modern architectures, particularly at the high end? And how has the recent (in Fortran terms!) move from serial architectures to parallel ones affected practice? And indeed how has the evolution of those parallel platforms affected practice?