Why physicists still use Fortran (2015)

Re:Why physicists still use Fortran (2015) by ptero on Sunday October 15, 2017 @06:07PM (#15479600)

To do such a rewrite one needs domain knowledge much more than you need software engineering knowledge. This means you need to get research physicist to contribute major effort into such a rewrite. To get there one needs to make them see a clear benefit of translating a system (that works fine today, thank you), from language A to language B.

A Ph.D. student or a young researcher might be more interested if a rewrite lets them run experiments using Amazon / CUDA / whatever for a few thousand dollars instead of spending scarce grant money on dedicated hardware.

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Re:Why physicists still use Fortran (2015) by myrandomcomment on Monday October 16, 2017 @05:32PM (#15486788)

They are talking about large scale massively parallel code to run on a super computer. Most grad students in physics that need it have have access to a system much faster then Amazon. For example my friends code runs on Cori @ NERSC which is a 622,336 core Cray.

http://www.nersc.gov/systems/cori/

I completely agree on the domain knowledge statement. It is 100% required more then the CS degree.

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