On Mon, Oct 19, 2020 at 4:28 AM 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, … > > Well, some of it surely comes from the fact that some of us (even older ;) never wanted to touch Fortran with a 10-foot pole, so having a "modern" fortran means nothing. The other part is more paradigm - some new distributed computation systems rely on long-lived actors, for example, that have a "memory". Fortran would have a hard time replicating that and for the most part people who work with Fortran probably would have a hard time finding a use for such an approach anyway. But yes, in general, I hear what you are saying. Just note that I consider myself to be from the old school as I walked into HPC in the late 1990s. I am not someone who graduated in 2017 and whose idea of parallel is Java's threads and whose idea of distributed is (only) Spark.
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