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Re: LLVM to get Fortran compiler that targets parallel GPUs in clusters

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Double-A <double-a3@hush.com> wrote:
> On Friday, November 13, 2015 at 3:28:48 PM UTC-8, Sam Wormley wrote:
>> LLVM to get Fortran compiler that targets parallel GPUs in clusters
>> > http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/llvm-to-get-fortran-compiler-that-targets-parallel-gpus-in-clusters/
>> 
>> 
>> > Today, the US Department of Energy announced that it had established
>> > a partnership with Nvidia that would be enhancing the LLVM compiler
>> > collection. The goal will be to port an existing Fortran compiler
>> > that targets massively parallel GPUs. The results are expected to be
>> > released as open source in late 2016.
>> >
>> > While Fortran isn't a mainstream language, it's still heavily used in
>> > scientific computing, and there's lots of legacy code that relies on
>> > it. A lot of that code is maintained by people at the US National
>> > Labs, and the new project is being organized by staff at Lawrence
>> > Livermore, Sandia, and Los Alamos.
>> >
>> > They'll be working closely with a division of Nvidia that makes the
>> > PGI Accelerator toolkit. That software is designed to allow clusters
>> > to use the computation abilities of GPUs on the cluster to perform
>> > distributed computations. PGI Accelerator's syntax is intended to be
>> > similar to that of OpenMP, a parallel computing API that's also
>> > heavily used in scientific computing.
>> >
>> > According to National Labs' announcement, LLVM was already attracting
>> > interest from the high performance computing community, but they were
>> > mostly using its CLANG C/C++ compiler. But many of the large software
>> > packages used in scientific computing have a mix of C++ and Fortran
>> > modules, providing the incentive to bring it all under one toolchain.
>> > Los Alamos' Patrick McCormick said "The goal of this effort is to
>> > fill a key gap in the LLVM infrastructure that will help it become a
>> > more complete solution for our overall capabilities in support of the
>> > advancement of science and engineering."
> 
> 
> When I was studying Fortran at the university about 45 years ago, I was told my a math professor that Fortran be obsolete by the time we graduated.   My.  Some things just never seem to fade away!
> 
> Double-A
 
Fortran has been obsolete for new applications for decades.

The problem is the huge piles of legacy math and science code no one
can afford to port to a more modern language.

Programming hell is to be tasked with maintaining legacy Fortran or 
Cobal code.


-- 
Jim Pennino

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LLVM to get Fortran compiler that targets parallel GPUs in clusters Sam Wormley <swormley1@gmail.com> - 2015-11-13 17:28 -0600
  Re: LLVM to get Fortran compiler that targets parallel GPUs in clusters Double-A <double-a3@hush.com> - 2015-11-15 12:38 -0800
    Re: LLVM to get Fortran compiler that targets parallel GPUs in clusters jimp@specsol.spam.sux.com - 2015-11-15 20:53 +0000
      Re: LLVM to get Fortran compiler that targets parallel GPUs in clusters Double-A <double-a3@hush.com> - 2015-11-16 13:29 -0800
        Re: LLVM to get Fortran compiler that targets parallel GPUs in clusters Puppet_Sock <puppet_sock@hotmail.com> - 2015-11-16 13:39 -0800
    Re: The US Department of Energy needs to port their code to C. GreyCloud <cumulus@mist.com> - 2015-11-16 11:53 -0700

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