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Fortress is a new programming language from Sun Microsystems. It is designed for writing large-scale programs that run on high-performance computing systems. Fortress is a direct successor to Java, and borrows many features from that language. However, it is not backward-compatible with Java, and is not intended to be a replacement for it. Rather, Fortress is intended to complement Java in Sun's high-performance computing strategy. Fortress is a statically typed language, meaning that all variables must be declared with a type before they can be used. This allows the compiler to catch errors early, and makes it easier to optimize code for performance. Fortress also supports type inference, which means that the compiler can automatically infer the types of variables in some cases. This can make code more concise and easier to read. Fortress includes many features that are designed to make it easier to write parallel programs. For example, it has built-in support for data parallelism, which means that the same code can be run on multiple processors at the same time. It also has support for concurrent programming, which allows different parts of a program to run at the same time. This can make it easier to write programs that take advantage of multicore processors. Fortress is designed to be used on large-scale computing systems, such as clusters and supercomputers. It includes support for running programs on multiple nodes, and for using distributed data structures. This makes it possible to write programs that can take advantage of the full power of a large-scale system. Fortress is still in development, and is not yet ready for production use. However, it is available for download, and Sun is inviting developers to try it out and give feedback. Fortress has the potential to be a powerful tool for high-performance computing, and Sun is hoping that it will help make Java a more competitive platform in this area.