On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 10:21 AM, <smi...@zenzebra.mv.com> wrote: > EBo <e...@sandien.com> writes: > >> Ah. Thanks for the info. I asked because some of the physicists and >> atmospheric scientists I work with are likely to insist on having >> FORTRAN. I still have not figured how I will deal with that if at >> all. > > I thought those folks used languages like Matlab & Mathematica for > analysis, modeling, etc. At least those were what we used in the > physics department @ RPI. >
Matlab and Mathematica are great for quick stuff (loved Matlab for my engineering courses) but parallel scientific computing still loves its FORTRAN + MPI + LAPACK etc. The reason being that Matlab is extremely easy to write... but is also slow, and limited to one machine. FORTRAN is extremely primitive, but scientists like it because 1. It's simple (no pesky lambdas etc), 2. They're familiar with it, and 3. It's very efficient. For similar reasons, C + MPI is also quite popular. John
