Fortran 90/95 and Linux OS

"Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. Originally developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, Fortran came to dominate this area of programming early on and has been in continual use for over half a century in computationally intensive areas such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, computational physics, and computational chemistry. It is one of the most popular languages in the area of high-performance computing and is the language used for programs that benchmark and rank the world's fastest supercomputers."

Wikipedia

Fortran Linux Development

Linux forms a great platform for engineering development in Fortran F90/95, due to the fact that it offers various free Fortran 90/95 compilers. Most important ones will be briefly introduced in the following section. All of these compilers either come packed with a Linux distribution or can be downloaded and installed free of charge on any Linux distribution. Linux OS (KDE) include a great Editor called Kate (Kate - KDE Advanced Text Editor). Kate is a multi document editor, based on a rewritten version of the kwrite editing widget of KDE, offering all the features of that plus a bunch of its own. It includes a sintax highlighting for Fortran F90/95. Combined with Makefiles gives a great substitution for Fortran IDE on Linux OS.

Intel Fortran Compiler

Intel offers a Fortran Compiler for Linux OS which is specially designed to exploit full features of Intel Pentium processors. It compiles code targeted for IA-32 Intel Architecture and Itanium Architecture. The Intel® Fortran Compiler for Linux* delivers outstanding application performance through optimization technology, threaded application support, and compatibility with leading tools and standards. This compiler fully supports multi-core processors along with existing Intel® processors and architectures. Advanced optimization features deliver outstanding application performance on the latest Intel processors. This compiler supports OpenMP parallel programming for Fortran 90 and 95 language standard, as well as Fortran 77.

GCC Compiler Collection

GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection, includes front ends for C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada, as well as other libraries. The GNU Fortran 95 project, or gfortran, is developing a Fortran 95 compiler front end, as well as runtime libraries, for GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection. Gfortran development is a part of the GNU Project, aiming to bring free number crunching to all GNU system variants. The gfortran development effort uses an open development environment in order to attract a larger team of developers and to ensure that gfortran can work on multiple architectures and diverse environments.

PHOTRAN - Eclipse IDE for Fortran

Photran is a full featured Fortran IDE for Linux OS (IDE - Integrated Development Environment). It is based on the well-known Eclipse platform, which makes it ideal for those developer already familliar with C/C++ development on Eclipse. It can be bundled with various Fortran compilers (e.g. Intel Fortran Compiler, F compiler, G95, gfortran, etc.). It is completely GUI interfaced, with included front-end for underlaying fortran debugger. Project development is maintained through the use of standard "make" utility and a user written makefiles. Fortran projects could be maintained (and created) by automatically generated makefiles for Intel Fortran Compiler and G95 Fortran Compiler. This feature could be usefull for those not so experienced linux programmers. Photran IDE is, as has been already said, based on the Eclipse platform and hence highly adaptable. Its editor has a sintax highlighting for Fortran F90/95 (including the brackets matching feature). Basic tutorial for the Photran IDE on Linux can be found here.

G95 Fortran Compiler

The goal of the G95 project is to create a free, open source Fortran 95 compiler and runtime libraries. As the official page for the G95 project says: "Most of Fortran 95 has been implemented except for a few musty corners". Source code for the numerous numerical packages has been tested with G95 Fortran Compiler and are exteremly stable. List of packages can be found here. Official documentation can be found here. Installation process for the G95 Fortran Compiler is very easy. All you need is to download a (small) tar ball, extract it and make a simbolic link from a directory in your path. Installation instructions are a part of the tar ball. Tar ball of the binaries coould be found here.

SunStudio 12

Sun Studio 12 software delivers a high-performance, optimizing C, C++, and Fortran developer toolchain for Solaris, OpenSolaris, and Linux operating systems, including support for multicore x86- and SPARC-based systems. SunStudio 12 includes parallelizing compilers, code-level and memory debuggers, performance and thread analysis tools, OpenMP support as well as optimized math libraries. It also comes with a full IDE for both C/C++ and Fortran 90/95 programming languages.

With this next-generation NetBeans-based IDE, development of Fortran 90/95 applications (as well as C/C++ applications) has never been easier. Everything just mentioned is FREE for download from Sun web pages here. All you need is to register. Installation on openSUSE 10.3 (tarfile method) works out of the box. Installation instructions (tarfile method) could be found here. One can create new Fortran projects for which SunStudio 12 automatically generates appropriate makefiles. One can also import existing projects (created for example in Eclipse Photran with Intel Fortran compiler) with existing makefiles. Legacy source code files, written in old FORTRAN 77, could be combined with new source code files, written Fortran 90/95, inside projects without any problems. Built in editor has a full Fortran 90/95 syntax highlighting feature, including brackets matching. This is truly an excellent IDE for Fortran 90/95 development on Linux OS.

Absoft Fortran Compiler

Absoft offers complete Fortran development suites with special tuning for both AMD and Intel processors. The compilers provides full support for the latest multi-core processors and advanced optimizers for outstanding performance on both 32-bit and 64-bit hardware. Extensive support for Cray, HP, Microsoft, Sun, SGI and VAX constructs simplify porting and retargeting code. Absoft provides a full development environment, designed for Fortran/C programming with each compiler at no additional charge. The development environment includes: full graphical IDE (command line use is also supported), graphical Fx3 debugger, prebuilt math libraries, 2D/3D graphics, example programs which include Fortran/C calling. Absoft tools are fully compatible with the gnu tool chain and many third party libraries. Companion compiler suites with the same look and feel are available for Windows and MacOS. Floating mixed platform licenses are also offered. Absoft Fortran Rolls + Rocks are now available for customers building clusters who would like preconfigured SDKs. These were created in partnership with Clustercorp who specializes in Rolls. The Rocks componet is open source so the Absoft Fortran Rolls + Rocks are very cost effective.

PGI Fortran Workstation

PGI Fortran Workstation is a complete Fortran 90/95 software development environment for Linux OS delivered by The Portland Group. It includes PGI Fortran compilers, for PGDBG® OpenMP and MPI graphical debugger and for PGPROF® OpenMP and MPI graphical performance profiler. If you develop or maintain scientific and technical applications, chances are you have a big investment in Fortran. After fifty years, it's still the cornerstone of technical computing. The PGI Fortran Workstation Fortran compilers deliver outstanding performance on 64-bit x64 and 32-bit x86 processor-based workstations and servers, and enable simple portable parallel programming for both shared-memory and clustered computing systems. Whether you have legacy FORTRAN 77 that relies on Cray, DEC, or IBM extensions, or are writing modern parallel codes in OpenMP Fortran 95 or High Performance Fortran (HPF), PGI Fortran Workstation has all the features you need. The PGI Fortran Workstation package includes the PGF95™ Fortran 95 compiler, the PGF77® FORTRAN 77 compiler, and the PGHPF High Performance Fortran compiler. PGF95 and PGF77 support automatic parallelization for SMP workstations using a simple compiler switch, and full native support for OpenMP directive-based SMP parallel programming. More about PGI Fortran Workstation can be found here.

CodeForge

Code Forge IDE is an Integrated Development Environment for Unix/Linux that provides full project management and a complete edit/compile/debug cycle support for over 30 programming languages, including Fortran. Its advanced project management features allow it to scale from simple to extremely large and mixed-language as well as multi-user projects. Total integration between the built-in advanced source editor, debugger, revision control and difference tools provide the programmer with unprecedented control over the development process. A CodeForge IDE license includes 12 months of technical support and software upgrades. The Project Manager gives a visual representation of all of its components through the use of a dependency tree. Users can easily set up multiple targets of different types, mix programming languages and even revision control types within the same project. The GUI project manager provides full abstraction of the "Makefile" concept. Project Makefiles are generated and maintained automatically by the CodeForge project engine. Intuitive Drag and Drop operations on the Dependency Tree and project desktop, are automatically converted to make script statements. A GNU Makefile representation of the Project is kept up to date with every change applied to the project. The resulting Makefile can be executed from the command line.