Refactorings for Fortran and high-performance computing

Not since the advent of the integrated development environment has a development tool had the impact on programmer productivity that refactoring tools have had for object-oriented developers. However, at the present time, such tools do not exist for high-performance languages such as C and Fortran; moreover, refactorings specific to high-performance and parallel computing have not yet been adequately examined. We observe that many common refactorings for object-oriented systems have clear analogs in procedural Fortran. The Fortran language itself and the introduction of object orientation in Fortran 2003 give rise to several additional refactorings. Moreover, we conjecture that many hand optimizations common in supercomputer programming can be automated by a refactoring engine but deferred until build time in order to preserve the maintainability of the original code base. Finally, we introduce Photran, an integrated development environment that will be used to implement these transformations, and discuss the impact of such a tool on legacy code reengineering.This work is being funded by IBM under the PERCS project.