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Sun Microsystems Takes an Open-Source Approach

Sun Microsystems released a prototype open-source programming tool designed to execute Fortress programs line by line. Fortress is a draft specification for a programming language being developed by Sun Microsystems as part of a DARPA-funded supercomputing initiative. Guy L. Steele, Jr., whose previous work includes Scheme and Java, is one of the members of the design team.

Fortress is intended to replace FORTRAN, a programming language especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. FORTRAN was originally developed by IBM during the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications. FORTRAN is still in use in computationally intensive areas such as climate modelling, computational fluid dynamics, computational physics, and computational chemistry. Intel`s x86 chips and Advanced Micro Devices have two or four processing cores and Sun Niagara chips have eight cores, with plans to move to sixteen, in the near future. For that reason, the need for programming languages that can more efficiently work on parallel processors has become more widely needed in recent years, and is most likely going to grow in the future.

Sun hopes that programmers will be drawn to using the new programming language because of its superiority in multicore processes, as well as, its open-source development platform. "We certainly have a lot of visibility in the high-performance computing market right now. We think as multicore becomes more important for ordinary desktop systems that programmers are going to have to turn to a language like Fortress in order to take advantage of the performance their hardware is providing to them," Eric Allen, a Sun Labs computer scientist and Fortress project leader, said.