Why physicists still use Fortran (2015)

Re:Why physicists still use Fortran (2015) by quadruplebond on Sunday October 15, 2017 @12:00PM (#15477674)

For science codes, where Fortran is still used, the most expensive pieces (think DGEMM Kernel) are largely written in architecture dependent ASM anyways so programming language doesn't have that much of an effect on the most time critical pieces of large HPC programs.

If a specific function is important enough it will be hand optimized in a way that the language doesn't really matter. Sometimes that means calling MKL, or using Cuda, or writing your own assembly.

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Re:Why physicists still use Fortran (2015) by pletnes on Sunday October 15, 2017 @01:18PM (#15478036)

DGEMM doesn’t necessarily win over MATMUL for small matrices. Useful in e.g rotation matrices in finite element codes, and lots of other areas. Since matmul can be done with inlined loops, you also avoid the function call overhead, but it looks like a function call which is good for readability.

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Re:Why physicists still use Fortran (2015) by quadruplebond on Sunday October 15, 2017 @06:49PM (#15479784)

Yeah small and skinny matrix multiplies are an active area of research.

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