Type of Talk: Colloquia

Speaker Name: Eri

c Allen

Speaker Affiliation: Research Scientist %40 Sun Microsystem

s

Date: Tuesday January 30 2007

Start Time: 3:30 p.m.

Location: ACES 2.402

Host: FoCS

Talk Title: Project Fo

rtress

Talk Abstract:
Fortress is a new programming language desi

gned for high-performance
computing with high programmability. In order
to explore breakaway approaches to improving programmability the Fortress
design has not been constrained by legacy language syntax or semantics; a

ll aspects of language design for high-performance computing have been reth

ought from the ground up. As a result we are able to support features in F

ortress such as transactions specification of locality and implicit paral

lel computation as integral features built into the core of the language.

Other features such as the Fortress component system and test framework f

acilitate program assembly and testing and enable powerful compiler optimi

zations across library boundaries. Even the syntax and type system of Fortr

ess are custom-tailored to modern high-performance computing supporting ma

thematical notation and static hecking of properties such as physical units
and dimensions static
type checking of multidimensional arrays and ma

trices and definitions of domain-specific language syntax in libraries. Mo

reover Fortress has been designed with the intent that it be a %60%60growa

ble'''' language gracefully supporting the addition of future language fea

tures. In fact much of the Fortress language itself (even the definition o

f arrays and other basic types) is encoded in libraries atop a relatively s

mall core language. In this talk we provide a brief overview of Fortress

and discuss the future of the project.

Speaker Bio:
Eric Allen

is a research scientist at Sun Microsystems where he is a principal invest

igator of the Fortress project. He is concerned with the design analysis

and implementation of new language features to increase program robustness

and programmer productivity.

Before joining Sun Eric was an impleme

ntor of the NextGen programming language an extension of the Java%5E(TM) P

rogramming Language with added experimental features. He was also one of th

e original programmers on the DrJava project an open-source IDE designed f

or interactive test-driven development hosted at Rice University. He was

the Lead Java Programmer at Cycorp Inc. and is also author of the book Bu

g Patterns in Java which discusses common bugs and how to avoid them. He h

as moderated forums for the online magazine JavaWorld and has written many
online articles on effective programming and debugging.

Eric receiv

ed a BA in Computer Science and Mathematics from Cornell University and an

MS and PhD in Computer Science from Rice University.