XL Fortran for AIX

XL Fortran for AIX V12.1 introduces the following new enhancements:

• IBM® XL Fortran for AIX® V12.1 now supports AIX V6.1 as well as AIX V5.3

• Supports a subset of the OpenMP Application Programming Interface V3.0 including addition of task level parallelization and loop parallelization

• The OPEN and INQUIRE statements have been updated with the ENCODING= specifier to indicate the encoding form of the file

• Enhancements to –qstrict. There are 16 new suboptions. These new strict suboptions give you greater control over optimization transformations

• –qreport now contains information about how many streams are created for each loop and which loops cannot be SIMD vectorized due to non-stride-one references

For more information on these and other new enhancements to XL Fortran, see "What's new for IBM XL Fortran for AIX V12.1".

XL Fortran offers optimization and performance-tuning features to exploit all Power Systems, including the latest POWER6 hardware architecture. The -qarch and -qtune compiler options include suboptions to provide code tuning for the POWER6 processors.

The compiler supports the AltiVec programming model and APIs on VMX-capable systems. You can take advantage of VMX instructions and automatic SIMD vectorization to improve program performance in high-bandwidth data processing and algorithmic-intensive applications.

XL Fortran for AIX adds new scalar and vector functions to the Mathematical Acceleration Subsystem (MASS). MASS consists of libraries of tuned mathematical intrinsic functions that offer improved performance over the standard mathematical library routines, are thread-safe and support both 32-bit and 64-bit compilations in C, C++, and Fortran applications.

XL Fortran for AIX includes the Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) set of high-performance algebraic functions. You can use these functions to perform combined matrix multiplication and addition on general matrices or their transposes.

The OpenMP Application Programming Interface (API) is a portable, scalable programming model that provides a standard interface for developing multiplatform, shared-memory parallel applications in C, C++, and Fortran. The specification is defined by the OpenMP organization, a group of major computer hardware and software vendors, which includes IBM. XL Fortran for AIX supports a subset of OpenMP API Version 3.0 specification including addition of task level parallelization and loop parallelization.

XL Fortran for AIX implements language and compiler features to provide enhanced compliance with the Fortran 2003 Standard.

XL Fortran for AIX continues to support IBM i on IBM Power Systems. IBM i provides a broad set of AIX interfaces in a runtime that allows many AIX binaries to execute directly on the Power processors used in IBM Power Systems. An application running on IBM i is fully integrated with IBM i work management, security, backup, file systems and database.