Report from the HPFF II Kickoff Meeting
January 13-14, 1994 -  Houston Texas

The Wall Street Journal started the meeting off properly with 
a timely cartoon showing a man in a restaurant saying "Stop me 
when I start ordering in Fortran!" :-)


At the end of this message is a list of the 20 formal and informal
presentations that were made at the meeting.  Details from these talks
are not included except for the following report on the status of formal  
Fortran standards: Plans are to release an update in 95 with whatever 
features are ready for the standardization process.  The HPF features 
for FORALL and PURE are likely to be included, along with the 
HPF intrinsics and the addition of the DIM argument to MAXLOC 
and MINLOC.  The syntax for the EXTRINSIC interface is 
awaiting the results of another ISO committee.


Report from the Business Meeting led by Ken Kennedy:
Jan 14, 94  10:15 am

Jerry Wagener presented a slide with the strategy that 
reflected the opinion of many  present:

HPF 1.x  (1994)

1. CCI -  Corrections, clarifications, interpretations
        including clarifying the ways that HPF 1.0 already supports 
        course-grained parallelism - e.g.   independent loops.

2.  Encourage "industrial strength" implementations:
        more notes to implementors
        collect, publish practical programming kernels
        support establishment of validation suite
 
3. Identify, flesh out requirements for HPF 2.0
        but don't "develop" these requirement yet. Candidates are:
        parallel I/O, irregular grids, additional  tasking.

4. Produce an HPF 1.x document

5.  HPF 2.0 (1995) if needed.


During the talks, there was one proposal for two meetings 
during 94 and another for three meetings.  The first order of 
business discussed was how many meetings would be needed to 
cover the topics that the group felt were ready for continued
HPFF discussion / development. 
The general consensus was  3 or 4 would be the right number.  Ken 
cautioned that we do not want this to be a process of 3 or 4 
meetings per year that go on and on.  We should be prepared at 
the end of the year to make concrete decisions about HPF 2.

The straw poll about the general approach summarized above was 39-1-1.

During talks, both Geoff Fox and Joel Saltz  addressed issues 
related to characterizing different kinds of applications.  
Geoff wishes to complete a table that indicates the kinds 
of features that are useful for various kinds of applications 
(e.g. which benefit from FORALL or use irregular meshes).  
David Loveman wishes for a slightly different kind 
of characterization - namely a list of common "cliches" that 
will tend to occur often - so that the compilers can target 
these for optimization.  Ken addressed an idea for a source of 
potential additional financial support for development of an 
HPF validation suite, since this effort is outside the scope 
of what is likely to be produced from academics.

Ken  commented that the general format of this meeting - 
experience reports from implementors, users, and researchers - 
followed by a business meeting to discuss strategy is very 
useful.  He proposes that this meeting be held annually, 
independently of the cycle of updates to HPF.

About meeting dates and places.  Alternatives suggested to 
Dallas for meetings were Denver and Chicago, with a straw poll 
showing only a very slight preference for Denver over Chicago.  
Costs and time schedules will be investigated to determine the 
place for the meetings.  The same general format of meetings 
will be used, so location will depend on finding a place where 
people can arrive from both coasts in time for afternoon 
meetings.  The dates currently proposed for meetings follow.  
These will be subject o checking with hotels for availability.

April 6-8;  June 1-3; Aug. 17-19;  Oct. 12-14,

{Note --- a  check of the airline guide shows that both Denver and Chicago
are possible, but that the earliest that west coast flights can get
into Chicago is 12:30-12:45 with ~6:30am departures, while Denver has 
more flexibility from both coasts. Any feedback that might impact choice
of location should be sent to tlc@cs.rice.edu and zosel@llnl.gov, asap}

The same guidelines as before are in place for these meetings.  
We ask that people who come commit to attending all of the 
meetings, if possible and also expect to contribute effort
between meetings.  Voting rules will be similar to the
previous sessions - one formal vote per organization - and 
(after the first meeting or two), votes only for those 
organizations who have attended previous meetings (exact 
details not spelled out).   

The first meeting will include technical working issues.  
Please send any issues that should be included on the agenda 
to Mary Zosel,  (zosel@llnl.gov).

An update of the survey of vendor implementation status was 
the final business item.  This will be sent out as soon an a 
few more vendor checks are made.


--------------------
List of speakers and titles for the formal and informal presentations:
--------------------

Ken Kennedy (Rice University): HPFF II: Charge to Participants

Jerrold Wagener (Amoco) / Matthijs van Waveren (ISO/WG5):
Fortran 95 Status - Status of HPF Features

Guy Steele (Thinking Machines): Experience with HPF at
Thinking Machines Corporation

David Loveman (Digital): Digital and HPF: One Company's Perspective

Alan Adamson (IBM SWS Toronto Lab): IBM's HPF Implementation Experience

Larry Meadows (Portland Group): A Retargetable HPF Compiler

John Levesque (Applied Parallel Research): To Use It Is to
Love It - HPF, Its Strengths and Weaknesses

Charles Koelbel (Rice U.): Experience with the Fortran 77D Compilers

Barbara Chapman (University of Vienna): Language Support for
Irregular and Dynamic Data Mappings

Henk Sips (Delft University of Technology): The PREPRARE Project:
an Environment for HPF Programs

Geoffrey Fox (Syracuse University): Some Lessions from
Applications for HPF and its Extensions

Jerrold Wagener (Amoco): Amoco Experience and Application Needs

Rob Schreiber (RIACS): HPF 1.1

Piyush Mehrota (ICASE): Evaluation of HPF for NASA Codes

Dan Reed (University of Illinois): Issues in HPF Performance
Monitoring and Tuning

Joel Saltz (University of Maryland): Irregular Problem Runtime Support

Joel Williamson (Convex): Tasking Features for HPF 2.0

Alok Chaudhary (Syracuse): I/O Issues

Andrew Johnson (OSF/RI): Informal Report on Status of ANDF

Lorie Liebrock (Rice University): Research Report



Mary Zosel
