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Re: Original commit history for gfortran
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