![]() The report they put together, called An Evaluation Of Risks Associated With Relying On Fortran For Mission Critical Codes For The Next 15 Years, can be downloaded here. (We covered the hardware issues relating to managing that stockpile a few weeks ago, and now we are coincidentally talking about separate but related software issues.) The researchers who have formalized and quantified the growing concerns that many in the HPC community have talked about privately concerning Fortran are Galen Shipman, a computer scientist, and Timothy Randles, the computational systems and software environment program manager for the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program of the DOE, which funds the big supercomputer projects at the major nuke labs, which also includes Sandia National Laboratories and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. What happened to Fortran?Ī better question might be: What is going to happen to Fortran, and that is precisely the one that has been posed in a report put together by two researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which has quite a few Fortran applications that are used as part of the US Department of Energy’s stewardship of the nuclear weapons stockpile for the United States. The programming courses in the aerospace engineering degree are dominated by C++, and C and MATLAB are also used. Penn State never became a supercomputing powerhouse like some American universities did, but the computing that was done there was typical of the time.įast forward to today, if you look at the course catalog for aerospace engineering at Penn State, the only Fortran available to play with by students is one that is somehow tied to OneAPI, which makes no sense to us because OpenAPI is supposed to be data parallel C++. At that very moment, the university was installing Sun Microsystems workstations in its first technical computing lab, and in came Unix and C along with Fortran. They represented a very weird past that bore more resemblance to a loom than a computer, as far as we were concerned. ![]() By the time we learned a little Fortran at Penn State in the mid-1980s as part of an aerospace engineering degree on an IBM 3081, the jobs were all interactive but the hallways were still lined with walls of punched card boxes as legacy program storage. Again, usually on either an IBM mainframe or a DEC VAX. The nerds all learned to program Fortran, which was two years older than COBOL, which came on the scene in 1959, and which was used to digitize the complex formulas underpinning scientific workloads. And more times than not, they learned these “real” programming languages on an IBM mainframe or minicomputer and sometimes on a DEC VAX. ![]() ![]() ![]() Back in the dawn of time, which is four decades ago in computer science and which was before technical computing went mainstream with the advent of Unix workstations and their beefy server cousins, the computer science students we knew at college had taught themselves BASIC on either TRS-80s or Commodore VICs and they went to college to learn something useful like COBOL and maybe got a smattering of C and Pascal, or occasionally even RPG, for variety. ![]()
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