HPCwire: Why Fortran Still Matters

Since 1986 - Covering the Fastest Computers
in the World and the People Who Run Them

Translation Disclaimer

Subscribe | Sign In

Visit additional Tabor Communication Publications

Leading HPC
Solution Providers

September 20, 2011

Why Fortran Still Matters

Nicole Hemsoth

Steve Lionel, commonly known as “Doctor Fortran” made a convincing argument this week for why the 54 year-old language is still relevant—and why it just doesn’t get the respect it deserves.

To counter the myth that Fortran is the Latin of the programming world, Lionel points to a few new applications that have been written in Fortran, including hurricane weather forecasting applications like the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF) which is written mostly in the venerable language. He also points to PAM-CRASH, an auto crash simulator as a prime example that stands out, claiming that in HPC, there are many valid, fresh uses for Fortran.

He admits that indeed, there are not a large number of applications in Fortran and that indeed, 20 years ago there were far more uses for it. Still, he says it isn’t fading completely even though there are, as he says, “a lot of C and C++ that that is more appropriate for certain things than Fortran is like string processing.

That aside, he says, “if you’re doing number crunching, working with a lot of floating-point data, or doing parallel processing, it’s an excellent choice. Its strengths in array operations -- its wide variety of routines -- make it attractive, and there is a huge library of freely available high-performance routines written over 40 years that still work together.”

Lionel looks to the strengths of Fortran in comparison to other languages, noting that Fortran 2008 has built-in parallel programming capabilities that no other languages have. He says, “Other languages have parallel programming features, but Fortran incorporated modern parallel programming in ways that non of the other languages have.” He points to a “an incredible body of well-written and well-debugged routines” in Fortran that are still open for reuse.

According to Lionel, just because the language is venerable, it doesn’t mean that it hasn’t changed over time. He points to a series of updates, including one just last year, claiming that new capabilities are being added constantly in response to the desires of programmers looking for vendor extensions and other features that became popular in other languages.

Full story at Intelligence in Software

Share Options

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in join the Discussion

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Subscribe to All Content

All

May 22, 2012

May 21, 2012

May 18, 2012

May 17, 2012

May 16, 2012

May 15, 2012

May 14, 2012

May 11, 2012

May 10, 2012

Feature Articles

OpenACC Starts to Gather Developer Mindshare

PGI, Cray, and CAPS enterprise are moving quickly to get their new OpenACC-supported compilers into the hands of GPGPU developers. At NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference this week, there was plenty of discussion around the new HPC accelerator framework, and all three OpenACC compiler makers, as well as NVIDIA, were talking up the technology.
Read more...

NVIDIA Launches Kepler Into HPC

NVIDIA has introduced its first Kepler-generation GPU product for high performance computing, and revealed some of the inner working of the new architecture. The announcement took place at the kickoff of the company's GPU Technology Conference taking place this week in San Jose, California.
Read more...

Intel Rolls Out New Server CPUs

Intel Corp. has launched three new families of Xeon processors, joining the Xeon E5-2600 series the chipmaker introduced in March. These latest chips span the entire market for the Xeon line, from four- and two-socket servers, down to entry-level workstations and microservers. A number of HPC server makers, including SGI, Dell, and Appro announced updated hardware based on the new silicon.
Read more...