Newsgroups: comp.parallel,comp.sys.dec,comp.sys.super,comp.unix.aix
From: Marc Baber <marc@efn.org>
Subject: APR Forge Explorer (Fortran Browswer) Shareware Distribution
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
Date: Mon, 14 Aug 1995 19:33:22 GMT
Message-ID: <9508081815.AA24073@efn.efn.org>

APR ANNOUNCES SHAREWARE DISTRIBUTION OF FORGEX FORTRAN CODE BROWSER
Monday August 7, 1995
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SACRAMENTO, CA -- Today, in a move that could greatly enhance how
people work with Fortran programs, Applied Parallel Research (APR)
announced it will begin shareware distribution of its Forge Explorer
Code Browser on September 1st.  On that date, the FORGEX binaries for
five major workstation platforms (DEC, HP, IBM RS/6000, SGI and Sun)
will become available on the internet via FTP and the WEB as described
at the end of this article.

Users who download FORGEX will get a free 120-day trial period, during
which they may use FORGEX as extensively as they wish.  After the trial
period, users are expected to register their copies to continue using
FORGEX.  University faculty and students will be permitted to extend
the trial period indefinitely and continue using FORGEX for free.  The
nominal registration fee of $395/workstation is less than half of the
previous list price.  Customer support, bound manuals and upgrades will
only be available to registered users, however.

"From our customers' input, we know that we have the best
parallelization tools in the industry, so in order to broaden our base
we want the world to get a taste of what real interactive analysis of
Fortran programs can be," says John Levesque, President of APR.  "While
other organizations are just now investigating how to develop parallel
tools, we want to establish the FORGE system as the standard.  By
making the foundation of APR's parallel toolset easily available, we
intend to create a ground-swell of demand for our other tools.  Down
the road, we expect that many users will choose to take the next step
up to our parallelizers, FORGEX/SMP and FORGEX/DMP."

APR's distributed memory (DMP) and shared-memory (SMP) parallelizers
are available in both interactive and automatic forms, but will not be
distributed as shareware.  The interactive version of DMP is available
as an add-on to the FORGEX browser and uses the same Motif GUI.  SMP is
being ported from an older GUI to Motif and will be released as a
FORGEX add-on soon.  By using DMP and SMP in combination, programmers
may even do multi-level parallelization for hybrid systems such as
distributed clusters of multiple shared-memory systems.

When asked to explain his company's radical change in marketing
approach, APR's Vice President Gene Wagenbreth explained, "Even though
APR and researchers such as Ken Kennedy's people at Rice University
have been using global analysis for about a decade, most programmers
and most Fortran compilers still look at programs one routine at a
time.  We want to change the way people think about their Fortran
applications-- we want to help them think of the program as a whole and
not just a collection of separate routines.  We want them to expect and
demand the performance benefits that can be achieved when compilers go
beyond mere interprocedural analysis to true global analysis.  Our
strategy for long-term success is to increase understanding of, use of,
and demand for global analysis.  Then we will license APR's technology
to be embedded in other vendor's Fortran compilers."

The FORGEX code browser is a powerful, global Fortran analysis tool
with a Motif graphical user interface (GUI).  The set of program units
in an application (main program, subroutines and functions) is called a
"package".  After building the program database for a package, FORGEX
gives the programmer global views and analysis of the package from
several important perspectives.

First, FORGEX displays a calling tree showing program, routine and
function names with embedded DO-loops.  The static calling tree gives a
rough idea of the computational complexity at each level in each call
subchain.  In order to gain a more precise profile of the computational
resources spent in different parts of the application, FORGEX can be
used to create a dynamic calling tree showing the percentage of CPU
time spent at or below each node in the tree.

To view the dynamic call tree, a FORGEX user clicks on the code timing
instrumentation feature.  Next, the user saves the FORGEX-instrumented
version of the application in a file.  Then, in another window, the
user simply compiles the instrumented file, links it with APR's timing
library and runs the code on the target platform, saving the standard
output (stdout) to a timing file.  Returning to FORGEX, the user types
the name of the timing file into a pop-up window and clicks on the
option to view the calling tree with timing information.  The call
tree with percentages of CPU time is then displayed.

FORGEX also displays common block tables showing which common blocks
have variables that are defined, set or used in each program unit.
Clicking on a cell in the table causes a Set/Use table for each
variable in the selected common block to appear.  Clicking on a single
variable causes a global trace of the variable to be shown, including
all the statements in the package that set or use the variable, any of
its aliases up or down the call chain, or any equivalenced aliases
of the selected variable.

FORGEX can perform a global consistency check on common block
definitions or, at the click of another option, reformat the entire
application with re-sequenced statement labels and proper indentation
(according to user-modifiable parameters).

A powerful query option allows the programmer to select variables from
FORGEX's global database by a number of criteria including storage
class, variable type, array shape and extent.  Program statements can
also be selected by any combination of several attributes.

On September 1, the shareware FORGEX distribution will be available
through APR's web page at http://www.infomall.org/apri/.  FTP users may
ftp to ftp.infomall.org and find the shareware binaries beneath the
tenants/apri directory.

APR is a leading supplier of software tools for Fortran program
analysis, performance measurement, parallelization, restructuring, and
dialect translation.

           ___   _____    _____
__________/==|__|==__=\__|==__=\     Applied Parallel Research, Inc.
_________/===|__|=|__\=\_|=|__\=\    1723 Professional Drive
________/=/|=|__|=|__/=/_|=|__/=/    Sacramento, CA 95825
_______/=/_|=|__|==___/__|====_/_______________________________________________
______/=___==|__|=|______|=|\=\________________________________________________
_____/=/___|=|__|=|______|=|_\=\_______________________________________________
    /_/    |_|  |_|      |_|  \_\    
Voice:     (916)481-9891             E-mail:    support@apri.com
FAX:       (916)481-7924             APR Web Page: http://www.infomall.org/apri/
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