[Beowulf] Course: Parallel Programming of High Performance Systems

[Lux, Jim (337C)]

I don't have grey hair (part grey beard, I confess), but I have plenty of
70s era FORTRAN that benefits from parallelization.
Numerical Electromagnetics Code V4, specifically.

The implementation has been throughly validated and have been used for
decades, finding all the little idiosyncracies and dealing with numerical
precision issues, etc.  There's extensive software around that generates
the card image input files it expects and parses the line printer output
files (with the 1 in column 1 for a page break).

Rewriting it from scratch would not be a very good use of time. You'd have
to revisit all the years of validation, make sure there were subtle
differences in function, because while there's an official validation
suite, it's more to make sure that the compile worked ok and there's not
an egregious problem. And who knows what users out there have depended on
some idiosyncratic implementation aspects.

I suspect the same is true for lots of fluid mechanics and other FEM codes
(NASTRAN, for instance).

So an incremental approach of parallelizing that old FORTRAN, replacing
pieces with "new FORTRAN", for instance, might be useful.

(and don't get me started on my experiences with the f2c engine)

 



On 1/11/12 7:36 AM, "Vincent Diepeveen" <diep at xs4all.nl> wrote:

>Yeah, the sheets are there from the 2003 lecture.
>filename LRZ210703_1.pdf
>
>Very helpful if you have grey hair and want to port your years 80
>fortran code to todays HPC hardware.
>
>Vincent
>
>On Jan 11, 2012, at 10:13 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote:
>
>> ----- Forwarded message from Georg Hager <Georg.Hager at rrze.uni-
>> erlangen.de> -----