Fortran Transformation Tools
Fortran, one of the oldest programming languages, is still heavily used in the scientific community for computationally intensive applications today. The Fortran Transformational Tools (FTT) project aims to further support and extend Fortran with a set of tools and introduced efficiencies for developers.
FTT mainly addressed the following areas:
- Support for the Fortran 2008 standard in open source parser infrastructure.
- Refactoring tools that facilitate code maintenance.
- Increased portability and performance on today’s processors.
The DOE funded FTT project created a Fortran compiler infrastructure (the Open Fortran Parser) that supports tool development aiding the creation and maintenance of scientific applications. This software supports versions of Fortran up to and including the Fortran 2008 standard, with support for experimentation with new language features.
In addition, we developed analysis tools using this infrastructure to be used by developers to help find and reduce the number of software defects in their codes, help them in code maintenance through refactoring tools, and improve their application’s portability and performance on petascale computer architectures. Such transformational tools are needed to solve the triple threat of programmability, portability, and affordability brought about by these new processor architectures.