Grad students in CS can easily make over $30k at a summer internship (I've done several).

And it doesn't say which Fortran they are using bog standard GFortran or Intel Fortran with all the parallel extensions.

With this sort of code you also tune it to the machine architecture back when I did F77 for BT / Dialcom the code was tweaked to suit the PR!ME Architecture to get extra speed

when they say 'modern' fortran i take it to imply a a compiler and standard from sometime in the last 20 years.

i've heard people refer to c90 as modern before.. (in the last two years) and the nasa/astronomy guys are famously clingy to 'known good' tech from the olden days.

only the very most recent astronomical dataset i acquired was in .csv. everything is made for fortran from what i've seen over the last 10 years...

> for several months of work

Not quite, the submission deadline is already in 8 weeks. And before you see any code, you need to go through their approval process, which they say takes several weeks. So you only have maybe 4 to 6 weeks to get the actual work done...

I am fairly certain there's a PhD organizer behind this who is well aware of the pain involved, spent over a year trying to set this up with the plan of having a 6 month competition window, and was shocked to find how much crap and delay they had to wade through just to get this out the door.

That same organizer is now gnashing their teeth, realizing full well how the organization extracted all the value out of that 2-year grant just forcing the proposal through (the money no doubt expires on 30 September but NASA bean counters no doubt refuse to cut checks after 31 August, or maybe even 31 July).

A hundred GS-7 employees, with an average education of a high school graduate, extracted the value of this poor bastard's grant with dozens of crappy PDF Standard Forms, emailed to distribution group of idiots and revised a dozen times each, and no, we can't even consider Form 2 until the President of these United States himself has signed off on Form 1.

I gotta tell ya boys, working for the Government sucks, but if you don't start stepping up, you're going to find your government, complete with nuclear weapons and responsibility for your clean water and bridge safety, is totally run by complete idiots.

well done for stepping up to the plate in that regard.

i do not see this opinion espoused, nor lived by often enough today.

kudos.

The graduate students who can solve and win this problem are not underpaid.

Maybe there's a paper waiting for the grad student who cracks the problem?