At 10:42 AM 3/13/2007, Jeffrey B. Layton wrote:
Glen Beane wrote:
Kyle Spaans wrote:
does that mean I
should suck it up and learn Fortran/C/C++?
Ouch this hurts! I've gotten the same rubbing from RGB. I hate to
say it, but I'm a Fortran programmer ("Hi! My name is Jeff and I'm
a Fortran programmer. Hi! Jeff!").
I'm with you brother Jeff! I grew up programming in FORTRAN, and I
still believe in it for those sorts of applications where it's
appropriate. I'd hate to have to write (another) parser in FORTRAN.
Yes, one can write a scheduler/kernel in FORTRAN, but it's not
pretty. Anything with lots of list management is sort of a pain in
FORTRAN (at least as of the 80s.. I believe newer versions have
pointers and dynamic memory allocation)
The recent development of Fortran has been remarkable. Considering
the world was stuck with Fortran77 for many, many years, the new
features of Fortran are quite refreshing. If you really want you can even
do OO programming with Fortran (some of it is very useful IMHO).
I know this will set off a language war, but I've found that anything
technical or scientific I need to code is always easier in Fortran than
anything else (well except Matlab, but I usually prototype in Matlab
and move to Fortran for extra speed). For many other tasks, I use
Python or bash or perl or whatever I have handy.
So my general opinion about coding for clusters is to use whatever you
want. You can usually find thread libraries or MPI libraries for that
language. Of course, it's always best if you code in Fortran :)
Jim Lux
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