Gerry Creager wrote:
This will also be a big factor for University ITS departments
too which often seem to have (at least here in Australia) become
MS only shops.
It's not just in Oz. We see the same thing here. All the kids I
interviewed this year had a lot of C# and .net "experience" with no
grasp of how to do more general programming. Got a lot of folks who
could do web work if we'd bring in FrontPage, too. And these were from
our CompSci department...
Sadly, when I taught some HPC usage/programming classes a few years ago
at my alma mater, the students varied between knowledgeable scientific
computing users in chemistry/physics/biology, to people who "knew" Java
and C++. The latter couldn't program in C for some reason. No.
Really. Stop laughing. (for those that don't get it, C++ is C with
some extra stuff added on ... they are for all intensive porpoises, the
same language if you ignore OO stuff, generics/templates ...)
There were one or two people who knew Matlab programming. This is what
they used to run their code, and they want to use a cluster to run
Matlab faster.
Monoculture is not serving HPC well. CompSci has changed quite a bit
from when I was in school. I don't know too many CompSci departments
teaching Fortran these days. This is the case, though lots of the
serious scientific students/researchers I meet are continuing to use it.
I expect to hear of Fortress classes soon, and the next
Fad-of-the-month classes soon. But some of the bedrocks of scientific
computing are like Rodney Dangerfield ... they don't get no respect ...
--
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
web : http://www.scalableinformatics.com
http://jackrabbit.scalableinformatics.com
phone: +1 734 786 8423
fax : +1 866 888 3112
cell : +1 734 612 4615
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