Welcome

Thank you for purchasing the MEAP of Modern Fortran: Building efficient parallel applications. I'm excited that you chose to be part of this journey with me. This book is still in early development and I hope that you can help me make it as great as possible.

As you can probably tell from the title, this is a book about parallel programming with modern Fortran. I place emphasis on modern because Fortran has evolved substantially since 1957 when it appeared as the first high-level programming language in history. Despite the explosive growth and mobile- and web-oriented technologies in the last two decades, Fortran remains the only standardized language with a native parallel programming model – the Fortran Coarrays.

This book will teach you Fortran and parallel program by doing. It will guide you step-by-step through the development of a complete and parallel fluid dynamics solver from scratch. We will start by learning the core features of the language, essential for any Fortran application. We will then dive into Fortran Coarrays and learn how to decompose the computational domain into parallel tiles and exchange data between them. We will dig into measuring and improving performance of parallel apps, and later some object-oriented and functional programming techniques for data abstraction and writing cleaner code. Finally, we will cover modern approaches to interfacing C applications, as well as I/O with common data formats.