The High Performance Fortran Forum (HPFF) is an informal group formed by interested parties from both hardware and software vendors and academic institutions from all over the world. Most of the `major players' are involved, there are delegates from:
The group first met at Supercomputing '91, and had their first `solo' meeting in Houston, Tx in Jan '92 with 130 attendees. Their intention was to make swift progress (unlike x3j3/WG5, the Fortran Working Group!) and a draft standard was circulated a year after the groups inception at Supercomputing '92. After a period of public comment the de facto standard (HPF v1.0) was officially distributed in May 1993. The whole standardisation process was unusual because most of the discussions were by Email.
The objectives of the HPFF were to design a language which:
) and SIMD (Single Instruction
Multiple Data) machines,The project was considered to be a success and, as we will see, has recently lead to a new draft standard, HPF v2.0.
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