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

[Oddo Da]

On Mon, Oct 19, 2020 at 4:28 AM 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, …
>
> 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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