Chapter 1 Real-Valued Array Indices - An Initial Look

The paper proposes a simple extension to FORTRAN - arrays which allow indices to be real numbers. Additional FORTRAN constructs for the manipulation of these arrays are provided. Arrays with real-valued indices can be used in scientific applications which process spatial information. Initial efforts exploring the use and performance of these extensions on vector computers and parallel processing multi-computers are presented. The application of arrays with real valued indices to molecular dynamics is discussed. 1 Introduction There are many approaches to making the high performance of advanced architecture computers usable by scientific programmers. These approaches include: completely new languages which can be automatically optimized to run well on parallel systems, portable parallel subroutine libraries, and extensive language extensions which enable parallel execution. The approach in this effort is to make a simple but powerful extension to the FORTRAN-90 and FORTRAN-77 languages..