ACM TechNews

Sun's Fortress Language: Parallelism by Default

HPC Wire (07/16/08) Feldman, Michael

Sun Microsystems' Fortress programming language targets high-performance computer applications, but can also be applied to almost any type of large-scale parallel application. "We were looking for a language that was good for multicore, for supercomputing, and for everything in between," says Sun's Eric Allen. Fortress is an open source project, and almost anyone with a computer can try the language because the current Fortress prototype runs atop a standard Java Virtual Machine. Both task and data parallelism are supported by Fortress, with most constructs assuming concurrency unless sequential execution is specified by the programmer. The runtime employs a fine-grained threading model to implicitly farm out computations to available processor cores, and Fortress also supports explicit threading under the programmer's direction. The language uses implicit as well as explicit data distribution techniques for clustering, while its mathematical notation ability is probably its most notable feature. Fortress also supports many kinds of domain-specific formulations via new grammar generation. Sun believes that continuing to support Fortress as an open source initiative will help boost the language's adoption.

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