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We first released our Fortran Library of numerical and statistical routines in 1971. From the early days portablility was of vital importance to us so that we could maintain essentially just one base version of the Library. The advent of vector machines and, later hierarchical memory and shared memory parallel machines, presented a challenge to this model for us, but our involvement in the Level 2 and Level 3 BLAS and in LAPACK helped us understand the issues, and so we continued to be able to maintain essentially one base version.
Development of a library for distributed memory parallel machines was our next challenge. Experience and ideas from ScaLAPACK gave us the confidence to take that step, but nevertheless we took that step somewhat reluctantly since, for portability across distributed memory machines, we used PVM (and susequently MPI) to do the message passing, thus moving from our model of one base version of our Fortran Library.
HPF gives us the hope of getting back to having a single base version, but it is currently far from clear whether or not HPF will succeed. Without funding for projects such as PINEAPL, it would be hard for us to find the resources for separate Parallel Library development, so we remain optimistic that we can find a solution such as that offered by HPF.