Automated refactorings for high performance Fortran programmes. (31st May 2011)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Boniati, Bruno Batista; Charão, Andrea Schwertner; de Oliveira Stein, Benhur; Rissetti, Gustavo; Piveta, Eduardo Kessler
• Is Part Of: International journal of high performance systems architecture. Volume 3:Number 2/3(2011)
• Page Start: 98
• Page End: 109
• Publication Date: 2011-05-31
• Subjects: software refactoring -- source code restructuring -- high performance systems -- Fortran programming -- software design tool -- integrated development environment -- IDE -- Eclipse IDE; Computer architecture -- Periodicals; Computer systems -- Periodicals; High performance computing -- Periodicals; 004.205
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1751-6528

Abstract

Refactoring is a software engineering technique aimed at improving the design of software applications, without changing their external behaviour. Several refactorings have been proposed for object-oriented languages, but there are few related works focusing on procedural programming. Fortran is a procedural language heavily used in high performance computing, which is not fully explored considering refactoring support. In this paper, we describe a set of automated refactorings for Fortran based on the Photran plug-in, which is integrated with the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE). We present a set of experiments to evaluate the impact of the proposed refactorings in third-party Fortran applications. The results show that the proposed refactorings improve the design of existing applications without compromising their performance.