ERCIM News No.22 - July 1995


GMD - Strategic alliance to accelerate development of high performance Fortran applications was announced by GMD and The Portland Group, Inc. (PGI). The announcement was made at the conference on High-Performance Computing and Networking HPCN `95, May 3-5, in Milan, Italy. The goal of this alliance is to accelerate the porting and tuning of key commercial applications to High Performance Fortran (HPF), the rapidly emerging de-facto standard for parallel programming on shared and distributed-memory systems. Several major applications in crash simulation, aerodynamics, combustion and weather prediction will be ported to HPF. Under the terms of the agreement, GMD's Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing (SCAI) will utilize PGI's commercially available HPF compiler, pghpf, along with the institute's internally developed ADAPTOR parallelization tool to analyze, port and tune applications to HPF. The result will be a portable tuned version of each application which will run on any of the platforms supported by pghpf, including the IBM SP-2, Intel Paragon, Meiko CS-2, SGI POWER CHALLENGE, Solaris SPARC, and CRAY T3D systems.


ILC-CNR - DBT-Net, the Client-Server version of the DBT system, is about to be made available on Internet. DBT is a full-text retrieval system, widely used in Italy for literary and linguistic purposes and in both academic and commercial lexicographical projects; it has also been adopted by a number of European research institutions. DBT-Net currently runs in a Windows-like environment, but the UNIX version is due to be released shortly. It offers the same level of flexibility and user-friendliness and all the functionalities provided by the stand-alone version.The DBT system has been designed and developed by Eugenio Picchi, "Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale", Pisa, and patented by CNR. The client-server version has been implemented at ILC by Lisa Biagini. For all information on DBT-Net, contact picchi@ilc.pi.cnr.it.


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