On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 11:04:09PM +0700, "C. Bergstr?m" wrote: > 3) Fortran HPC community as a whole - The majority of Fortran users I > know work in or around HPC. (I may be biased) With that I can't say > most of them care about open source at all. (Some do) They buy/use > PathScale/PGI/Intel and for the larger labs I'm not sure if they use > gfortran. (They may, but I really don't have that data) Most of them > want their code to compile, get best performance and sometimes use > F2K3. You're not going to stop them from buying commercially supported > compilers.
I think biggest fortran users are organisations which are very conservative by design - power generation (particularly nuclear) and defence. For example, I've head from a colleague in Geography, who handled Met Office's (UK national weather predition service) fortran code that some routines in their production code are still in Fortran IV. These organisations are probably better characterised as mission critical, than HPC. All your VMS, NonStop, etc. I'd say F2K3 is pretty low on the agenda for them. I think it's those businesses that make the most of fortran user community, even though they are very quiet. Given their conservatism, they are not going to switch to anything else any time soon. That is not to say that they don't use other languages, just that they are not dropping fortran as their main production language. They might just be curious about an open source compiler, but probably never as a first choice. -- Anton Shterenlikht Room 2.6, Queen's Building Mech Eng Dept Bristol University University Walk, Bristol BS8 1TR, UK Tel: +44 (0)117 331 5944 Fax: +44 (0)117 929 4423
