Sun's Fortran replacement goes open-source | Tech News on ZDNet
It is interesting that Fortress is effectively an update of Fortran, focusing on parallel processing capabilities. There's a big buzz around Grid Computing in general, and the open source availability of this tool could help provide more programs that can make use of Grid infrastructures - I have always found that the main bottleneck for grid/parallel computing has been parallelising the algorithms for problems.
Sun Microsystems took a new open-source step this week, enlisting the outside world's help in an attempt to create a brand-new programming language called Fortress.Tweet Posted by mofoghlu at January 15, 2007 3:55 PM
On Tuesday, the company quietly released as open-source software a prototype Fortress "interpreter," a programming tool to execute Fortress programs line by line. "We're trying to engage academics and other third parties," Eric Allen, a Sun Labs computer scientist and Fortress project leader, said about the open-source move.
Fortress is designed to be a modern replacement for Fortran, a programming language born 50 years ago at IBM but still very popular for high-performance computing tasks such as forecasting the weather.
Even though Fortress grew out of a Defense Department-funded supercomputing project, it tackles a mainstream computing challenge, too: more easily extracting work from all those new processing engines appearing in multicore processors.