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Without DARPA Funds, Sun Opens Fortress


Focus is now on creating a parallel Fortran replacement

By Alex Handy
February 1, 2007 — 
Sun Microsystems’ Fortress is now open source. In early January, this next-generation parallel programming language was made available in the form of an alpha release that includes an interpreter but not a compiler. Future releases of Fortress will likely include the contributions of interested developers, as Sun has spent a great deal of time making Fortress amenable to the addition of new libraries.

Sun fellow Guy L. Steele Jr. said that Sun’s initial goal of winning a phase-three DARPA contract for the development of Fortress has now been replaced with the goal of creating an open source, massively parallel Fortran replacement. When Sun found that it hadn’t won the DARPA contract in November of last year, Steele said that the company decided to continue working on Fortress primarily because of its past successes with Java.

Said Steele: “Fortran is an array-oriented language. Fortran historically supported up to nine dimensional arrays, and as of 2003, it supported up to 15 dimensions in an array.” Fortress, said Steele, is built to accommodate an unlimited number of dimensions in an array, and is fenced in only by available memory.

Fortress was developed as a response to DARPA’s request for a secure programming language. As a result, Fortress was built on some of the same underpinnings as Java. “Like Java, and unlike Fortran or C++, you can’t violate the basic data types of the language,” said Steele. This means developers writing Fortress code can’t create some of the more common exploitable holes that come from sloppy coding.

While this initial release is only an alpha, and does not include a compiler, future releases will, said Steele. He added that the six members and one intern working full-time on Fortress have released a new specification for the language every two months. The team is also working on experimental code that shows off the abilities of Fortress.

AIMING HIGH
Currently, these experiments are benchmark-oriented, and include such examples as Gyrokinetic Toroidal Code (GTC). Steele said that creating GTC in Fortress is an attempt to match the performance of similar code written in Fortran, but with significant ease-of-use advances for the coder. GTC attempts to simulate the movement of particles inside of a plasma generator regulated by a doughnut-shaped electromagnetic field.

Heavy stuff for a language that’s not even compilable yet. But Steele and the Fortress team have been aiming high right from the start. Steele said that a considerable amount of time is currently being spent on allowing for the future addition of libraries. As such, much of the current work done by the Fortress team is focused on building out the extensible infrastructure of the language.

And that infrastructure is likely to see a great deal of interest from the open source community, said Steele. In the week since Fortress’ initial alpha release was made public, Steele claimed that the project’s Web site saw 18,000 visitors.

While none of those visitors will be compiling their Fortress code anytime soon, they are certainly able to play around with the syntax and structure of the language. And a powerful new language is always good for business, said Steele. “Java was a good thing for Sun, not because Sun made money directly off of Java, but because it grew the entire market.”


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