well, for me the first think after reading articles like this is always the social part to it: where the name comes from ie. helma was the name of the waitress at aida, a viennese cafe, photran is a vietnamese restaurant in urbana-champaigne, ill.

it's a plug in for fortran guys to use eclipse. now, well, ok. who uses fortran? grey old men in white coats with a slide rule in their pocket? i have heard about fortran, sure, historical piece, early 60s and so on. search brought it up: nasa, boeing, weather forcast, scientists, ok. recall this grid computing bit brian told me about: stars, simulation and parallel computing ... but to they mean the same one? fortran ide: fortran integrated development environments ... well going on and on to decipher the message. then there comes the sound part to it. congrats over there!

The Photran effort is being supported by IBM under the aegis of PERCS (Productive, Easy-to-use, Reliable Computing System), a $53.3 million project funded by DARPA to support "groundbreaking research" in areas such as chip technology, computer architecture, operating systems, compiler and programming environments. (photran)

PERCS:

We follow an integrated hardware-software design that can adapt to different types of workloads, so that the system can accommodate the needs of different application classes with a single design point, instead of the current practice of optimizing the system for a particular application class."

have heard about this approach recently from a guy from verisign: no way to secure each application, we need to centralize it ...