[Beowulf] ***UNCHECKED*** Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: Re: Spark, Julia, OpenMPI etc. - all in one place

[John Hearns]

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 <jcownie at 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 <jcownie at gmail.com>
> Mob: +44 780 637 7146
>
> > On 15 Oct 2020, at 12:07, Oddo Da <oddodaoddo at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 1:11 AM John Hearns <hearnsj at 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.
> >
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