Seeking to increase the attraction of the Vector Facility for the 3090 mainframes, IBM has added parallising Fortran compiler for 3090s with vectors fitted. Parallel Fortran is a compiler and support library that analyses programs written in Fortran for general purpose processors and automatically generates code that allocates parts of the job that can be run in parallel on multiple processors. It also provides language extensions that give programmers greater flexibility to create and manage parallel processing programs, says IBM, claiming this to be the first time the two capabilities have been combined in a single package. The software base is IBM VS Fortran Version 2 and supports the 3090 Vector Facility under both MVS/XA and VM/XA. Combining vector and parallel processing can give much greater speed than either alone may provide, but IBM says Parallel Fortran will be available only to a limited number of customers. A prototype has been running at the US National Science Foundation Supercomputer base at Cornell University for 13 months.
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