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Reviewer: Festus Gail Gray

The High Performance Fortran (HPF) language specifications developed by the High Performance Fortran Forum provide a portable extension to Fortran 90 for writing data parallel applications. This handbook functions as a user's guide to HPF. It provides clear explanations of both the purpose and the function of the new constructs, accompanied by numerous examples to illustrate both basic concepts and subtle effects. The handbook includes a review of new features of Fortran 90, concentrating on those that have an impact on HPF. Other chapters describe features for mapping data to parallel processors, specifying data parallel operations, and interfacing HPF programs to other programming languages. The book serves its purpose well, and I recommend it to those who want an understanding of the features of HPF. Well-chosen examples illustrate performance tradeoffs that result from various methods of data mapping and the complex relationships among data partitions and communications requirements. Many useful suggestions accompany the descriptions of each feature. The value of the whole HPF effort is questionable. To quote the authors, “Fortran was originally developed for serial machines with linear memory architectures.” This fact will effectively prevent FORTRAN from ever becoming a viable language for parallel machines and in fact from ever becoming a modern procedural language.