
NASA wants YOU (to make its Fortran code run faster) - drhurdle
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/nasa-wants-you-to-make-its-fortran-code-run-faster/
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podiki
Link to the competition page:
[https://herox.com/HPFCC](https://herox.com/HPFCC)

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cratermoon
Do schools still teach FORTRAN? Is there anyone under the age of 50 writing it
professionally (not just a little hobby dabbling)? Would someone who is expert
in the CFD domain be interested in picking through 30yo code to learn the
language and contribute?

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sevensor
I had the dubious pleasure of being assigned to revive some NASA FORTRAN code
from 1978 during grad school. FORTRAN 77 was too new, so it was written in
FORTRAN 66 style. With vendor extensions, naturally. Fortunately this wasn't
CFD code. It was an order of magnitude less complicated. Anyhow, nobody had
compiled this thing in 15 years. It took about a month for me to figure out
how to make it work, because it wasn't obvious that the garbage I was getting
out of it was because I was compiling it wrong. Eventually I found the right
flags for gfortran, and it just worked.

So yes, if you count grad students, people are working on FORTRAN for their
bread.

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Frenchgeek
I can do that: I usually manage to get the wrong answer really fast...

