Fortran Specialist Group Annual General Meeting 2017

1. Apologies for absence
2. Minutes of the previous AGM (29^th September 2016)
3. Matters arising
4. Chairman's report
5. Treasurer's report
   SG Development Fund report
6. Membership Secretary's report
   UK Membership Distribution maps (5.1 MB PDF file)
7. Web Editor's report
8. Election of Officers and Committee members
   (The following is taken from the Fortran SG Constitution:
   The name of any member accepting nomination for election or re-election as an Officer or as a Committee member shall be submitted in writing to the Secretary 7 clear days prior to the date of the AGM by two members of the Group with the written consent of the nominee.
   "In writing" applies equally to email or paper copy.)
9. Future activities for the Group
   
   
   • Future meetings with IoP Computational Physics Group
   • Proposals for broadening the remit and appeal of the Group
10. Any other business
11. Date of next meeting

Joint meeting with Computational Physics Group of Institute of Physics

We discuss the current status of the CoArrays implementation in GNU Fortran, through the experience of the OpenCoarrays project, with a selection of use cases. We also discuss the influence of various transport layers, including a discussion of the variations among multiple implementation of the MPI standard.

Fortran is a popular language for computational science codes which typically run on large supercomputers. With the advent of large Petascale machines, there is a strong emphasis on parallel scalability and energy efficiency. However, knowledge of verification of Fortran codes is lacking and there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that there is an over-reliance compilers to verify codes. This presentation will introduce a simple verification workflow and present the NAG compiler and verification tools for Fortran codes.

We will review how well current compilers comply with current standards.
The most recent table 'Compiler support for Fortran 2003, 2008 & TS 29113 Standard - rev 21 (April 2017)' is available from the Fortranplus website. It is also available here as a 173 KB PDF file.

I will provide a quick overview of the new features of Fortran 2015. For details, see N2127 on the WG5 site.

The process for choosing the technical content of Fortran 2020 has been agreed, in principle, at the Summer 2017 WG5 meeting in Garching, Germany (N2135, N2126). A user survey is now open, the results of which will be analysed by J3, and help prioritise proposed new features. However, real use cases must be provided to support all new feature requests, and costs of implementation will be taken into account when WG5 decides the final set of new features for 2020. This talk will expand on the WG5 thoughts behind these decisions and introduce the user survey.

One of the suggested features for Fortran 2020 in the new convener's survey is "Block-oriented or structured exceptions". Such a feature was included in 1994 drafts of Fortran 95, but was removed in November 1994 because it was seen as not ready and likely to delay Fortran 95. It was decided instead to provide features in support of the IEEE standard for floating-point arithmetic, but it was envisaged that structured exceptions could be added later. In this talk, I will describe the 1994 facility and discuss its adaptation as an extension of Fortran 2015.