PARALLEL FORTRAN IN SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING - A NEW OCCAM HARNESS CALLED FORTNET

Over the past year occam-2 harness has been developed for programming in a parallel FORTRAN language on transputer arrays. This harness facilitates the rapid development or adaptation of a variety of application codes in computational physics and chemistry of both the data "farming" and more general algorithmic parallelism strategy which are now seen to be emerging. The new software package, Fortnet, which we describe here, consists of an occam-2 communications harness to handle buffered, blocked data transmission and file manipulation together with a set of FORTRAN-77 routines which interface to the application program. The user is free to develop programs of the driver-master-slaves form, with both direct and indirect access to the front-end file system and inter-process communications. A number of debugging aids and runtime diagnostics are provided. We have tested the package on a number of applications and conclude that existing application code adapted to parallel machines is indeed beneficial in applied science. © 1990.