Och Jim, it's weel kent that yir a canny loon. Gie Fortran and OpenMP tae the bairns.
On Mon, 19 Oct 2020 at 10:51, Jim Cownie <jcow...@gmail.com> wrote: > Modern Fortran workshops exist - but they need to be promoted more widely. > > > Part of the issue may be in the use of the word “modern”, which is always > relative, (see “The Modern Movement” in architecture, which seems generally > to be agreed to have ended in 1960 :-)); similarly, it's not surprising if > people are confused when they Google for a book on “Modern Fortran”, and > the top hit is a book published in 2011[1] (admittedly if you scroll down > you find that there’s a later edition including Fortran 2018), the second > hit one published in 2012 [2]. (Of course, YMMV). > > So, perhaps we should now recognise that these standards will outlive us, > and instead of trying to emphasise modernity, stick to absolute names > (“Fortran 2018 Explained”…) > > The same problem likely applies to OpenMP (though at least Intel’s "OpenMP > Offload Basics" online course [3] is not called “Modern OpenMP” :-)). > And the free tutorial we’ll have at the UK & Europe OpenMP Developers’ > conference is "OpenMP for Computational Scientists: From serial Fortran > to thousand-way parallelism on GPUs using OpenMP” [4] > > [1] > https://www.amazon.co.uk/Explained-Numerical-Mathematics-Scientific-Computation/dp/0199601429 > [2] > https://www.amazon.co.uk/Modern-Fortran-Practice-Arjen-Markus/dp/1107603471 > > [3] > https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/oneapi/training/openmp-offload.html > > [4] https://ukopenmpusers.co.uk/ > > Which leads to my next point - dare I say it the IT industry exists > through churn. There is always a promotion of the new, > which means that the old must somehow be deficient. > > Unfortunately the presumption seems to be that the old is deficient > because it is old, and "my generation” didn't invent it (which is clearly > perverse; I see no rush to replace English, French, … which are all older > than any of our programming languages, and which adapt, as do our > programming languages). > > On 19 Oct 2020, at 09:48, John Hearns <hear...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Jim you make good points here. I guess my replies are: > > Modern Fortran workshops exist - but they need to be promoted more widely. > Which leads to my next point - dare I say it the IT industry exists > through churn. There is always a promotion of the new, > which means that the old must somehow be deficient. > I question - are 'the young' taking up Fortran programming? > However let's look at what drove the upturn in AI - it was being able to > run models on a GPU in your dorm room, or hire a GPU instance on the cloud. > But also shrink wrapped Tensorflow. > Should we be saying to kids - hey kid, you can forecast the weather / > design a new car with your own PC. > Maybe a container with some relevant software and models? > > And now everyone will point me towards such projects.... > > > > > On Mon, 19 Oct 2020 at 09:28, Jim Cownie <jcow...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> One more point, which may already have been made, but in case not… >> You are asking (my paraphrase…) >> * “Why hasn't MPI been replaced with something higher level?” >> * “Why hasn't Fortran been replaced with something higher level?” >> >> In that context, it seems worth pointing out that >> * Fortran is much higher level than it used to be (e.g. operation on >> whole arrays without needing loops was certainly not in FORTRAN IV or >> Fortran 77) >> * Since Fortran 2008, it has had support for the co-array features which >> mean that you can write distributed memory codes without (explicitly) using >> MPI, and with a syntax that looks like array indexing, rather than message >> passing. >> >> There’s a general educational issue here, which is that it is much easier >> for people to recognise that they need education to understand something if >> that thing is something they only just heard about, whereas even if it has >> many new features, if it’s something whose name they already know (and >> which they did a course in 15 years ago) then they think they already know >> all about it. >> Fortran clearly suffers from this, but so do C++, OpenMP, … >> >> -- Jim >> James Cownie <jcow...@gmail.com> >> Mob: +44 780 637 7146 >> >> > On 15 Oct 2020, at 12:07, Oddo Da <oddodao...@gmail.com> wrote: >> > >> > On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 1:11 AM John Hearns <hear...@gmail.com> wrote: >> > This has been a great discussion. Please keep it going. >> > >> > I am all out of ammo ;). In all seriousness, it is not easy to ask >> these questions because it kind of can be interpreted as offensive - in a >> nutshell, people may perceive what I am asking as "what have y'all been >> doing for 20 years? Nothing?". >> > >> > To the points on technical debt, may I also add re-validation? >> > Let's say you have a weather model which your institute has been >> running for 20 years. >> > If you decide to start again from fresh with code in a new language you >> are going to have to re-run known models >> > and debate whether or not they fit within error bounds of the old model. >> > That takes effort - which may of course be justified if you make gains >> in speed, flexibility or being able to use new hardware like GPUs. >> > >> > I understand all this but, of course, not everything has to do what has >> been done. Hopefully, there are plenty of people entering the field or >> coming back to it, without any technical debt. >> > >> > _______________________________________________ >> > Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin >> Computing >> > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit >> https://beowulf.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/beowulf >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > https://beowulf.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/beowulf > > > -- Jim > James Cownie <jcow...@gmail.com> > Mob: +44 780 637 7146 > > > > >
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