Project Fortress was an initiative at Sun Labs, sponsored by DARPA HPCS, to develop a next generation high performance programming language. Fortress was designed to enable programming at the "peta"-scale (petaflops of compute, petabytes of memory, which was orders of magnitude beyond the fastest computer in the world at the start of the project). It was actively developed from 2003-2011. I joined this team at the start of the project and had the honor of working with many outstanding researchers, including Guy L. Steele, Jr., a longtime hero of mine, and Steve Heller, whom I had the opportunity to work with for almost two decades at Sun Labs and Two Sigma. Originally, we referred to the language we were designing as "secure Fortran," despite the fact that, semantically and syntactically, it was nothing like Fortran! The name Fortress originally came to me in the middle of the night as a pun on the notion of secure Fortran; I was so amused with myself I had to get up and write it down. I suggested it initially to the team as an internal codename, and the name stuck. 

The above picture includes many (but unfortunately not all!) of the key contributors to the project, including several of our outstanding summer interns who have since gone on to do great research. 

Fortress was provided as an open source project, and a significant amount of technology was released over the lifetime of the project. I'm providing a repository for all material published as part of this project at:

https://github.com/Allen-Research/Fortress

There you will find source code along with supporting documents and tools.

Many years ago, my PhD advisor, Professor Robert Cartwright, initiated a broad research program at Rice that centered on Java technology, not only to advance object-oriented type systems research, but also to promote the use of Java for teaching computer science. He, Brian Stoler and I designed a new IDE for Java specifically tailored for use in the classroom. The pedagogic approach was inspired by Racket, another product of Rice PLT. Our experience is detailed in DrJava: A Lightweight Pedagogic Environment for Java. One of the important aspects of the design is the implementation of the interactions pain as a metacircular interpreter that calls out to JVM primitives, providing performant dynamic evaluation of Java code while also enabling immediate access to all Java libraries and JVM bytecode. With the help of numerous outstanding Rice students and interns, we released DrJava as an open source project, and with Charlie Reis joining the team, we continued its development via student projects in a special Rice elective that provided a production programming experience to undergraduates (using early agile principles, test-driven development, etc.). We described our experience in detail in the SIGCSE paper Production Programming in the Classroom.