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

[John Hearns]

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 <jcownie at 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 <hearnsj at 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 <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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>>
>>
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>
> -- Jim
> James Cownie <jcownie at gmail.com>
> Mob: +44 780 637 7146
>
>
>
>
>
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