GSOC - Student Roundup

[Daniel Carrera]

Hello Philip + Dimitrios

Thanks for your posts. I am another GSOC student. I am working on the 
Fortran front-end of GCC (gfortran). Like most GFortran developers, my 
background is more in the natural sciences (astrophysics in my case) 
rather than computer science.

My project is to help add coarray support for GFortran. Coarrays are a 
cool new feature in the Fortran 2008 standard that give Fortran native 
support for parallel programming (as opposed to using MPI or OpenMP). 
Scientific simulations (especially in parallel clusters) are the bread 
and butter of Fortran.


Learning how GCC works has been difficult but rewarding. My work is 
split between the libgfortran library, which is straight forward enough, 
and the Fortran front-end, which at first looked like gobbledygook. 
Today I can actually understand most front-end functions when I read 
them, but it took a long time to get to this point. GCC has a scary 
learning curve.

The libgfortran library is more forgiving for the beginner. We are using 
MPI as the backend to implement coarrays and I have very much enjoyed 
learning MPI.

So far my contributions have been modest, but now that I've crossed much 
of the learning curve, I feel optimistic. To an extent the progress has 
to be a bit slow because we are looking at the new Fortran standard and 
thinking about the best way to add features.

Cheers,
Daniel.
-- 
I'm not overweight, I'm undertall.