Re: One small catch...
Modern Fortran refers to Fortran 90 or later - usually at least Fortran 95 nowadays
Posts by Ian Bush
159 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jun 2007
Fortran greybeards: Get your walking frames and shuffle over to NASA
Thursday 4th May 2017 11:20 GMT
Don't quite get why this is particularly a Fortran problem - it's simply a result of floating point maths. In fact to expect bit wise identical results for every compiler/library/etc. combination in complex codes like those discussed here displays some ignorance about the nature of the beast, and that's before we even think about talking about parallelism. And in practice for the performance these guys need your choice of language is Fortran, C or C++, nothing else will cut it however much quiche you eat, and for all 3 the floating point issues are similar.
Teen in the dock on terror apologist charge for naming Wi-Fi network 'Daesh 21'
Boffins eschew silicon to build tiniest-ever transistor, just 1nm long
Monday 10th October 2016 07:53 GMT
Re: in which electrons as “heavier” and therefore able to be controlled ion shorter gates
They're not talking about the actual mass, they're talking about the "effective mass". Wikipedia has an article on it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_mass_(solid-state_physics)
but I admit I haven't read it to see how good it is
Command line coffee machine: Hacker shuns app so he can stay at the keyboard for longer
Monday 10th October 2016 07:32 GMT 
Make coffee
Give the explosion of caffeine options since I were a lad I'm surprised he didn't do this via the standard Unix build automation tool. Then he could do things like
make coffee
or
make cappuccino
or
make Venti-Iced-Skinny-Hazelnut-Macchiato-Sugar-Free-Syrup-Extra-Shot-Light-Ice-No-Whip
if he so wanted
Zilog reveals very, very distant heir to the Z80 empire
BOFH: Free as in free beer or... Oh. 'Free Upgrade'
Wannabe Prime Minister Andrea Leadsom thinks all websites should be rated – just like movies
Friday 8th July 2016 11:41 GMT
Re: Regression to the really mean
Yes there is a difference. But either will be a disaster. May wants to cement the surveillance state. Leadsom has no interest in the "common man", she merely wants to legalise the (in my opinion) tax scams she has run throughout her career - see Private Eye passim.
The best way to find oxygen on Mars? Friggin LASERS, of course
Nice cluster, kid. But can these supercomputing students actually predict the weather?
Tuesday 21st June 2016 16:28 GMT 
And the software comes from ...?
"There’s a twist in the competition on this task: for the first time ever, students have to write their own algorithm to solve the graph problem. They aren’t allowed to use the reference implementation – they have to provide their own approach. Teams will be judged on the quality of their code as well as their solution to the problem. It’ll be interesting to see what happens on this application."
Good. Call me a grumpy old sod (you're a grumpy old sod Ian), but while good fun and a demonstration of problem solving ability I struggle to see the real relevance of these competitions; you simply don't cobble together your own clusters any more, or at least you shouldn't be doing. But often the software is a different matter - where's the recognition of the people who write the stuff that can actually exploit this hardware? While I've seen the names of the teams competing and we're promised videos introducing them there's not even a link to the applications web pages, let alone naming the teams or institutions that develop them.
I must get out more ...
Lester Haines: RIP
If The Register made reality music TV, this is what it would look like
US nuke arsenal runs on 1970s IBM 'puter waving 8-inch floppies
Thursday 26th May 2016 07:54 GMT
Re: Programming skills .NE. programming languages
"There aren't that many COBOL and Fortran programmers left, and no one is learning those languages these days."
There are plenty of Fortran programmers left, and new people learning the language regularly, just not in computer science departments.
Thursday 26th May 2016 07:51 GMT
Re: Some Department of Commerce weather alert systems use Fortran
"HPC is still C, Fortran, Assembler, then C++"
Rather at the top end it's Fortran (~70%), C(~7%), C++(~6%) and other, at least in the UK. See
http://www.archer.ac.uk/documentation/white-papers/app-usage/UKParallelApplications.pdf
http://www.archer.ac.uk/documentation/white-papers/
and
http://www.archer.ac.uk/documentation/white-papers/app-usage/ARCHER_report.txt
for details. The numbers haven't changed much over the last few years.
Want a Brexit? Promise you'll sort out UK universities' £1bn research cash loss
Wednesday 18th May 2016 11:55 GMT
Re: The answer is...
"..that the UK is not a net beneficiary of EU funds. Ergo it could afford to replace all EU funding with direct funding by the UK government on leaving, out of the money saved by not propping up Eurocrats and Eastern European failed states",
assuming the pie stays at least the same size post-BRExit as it is currently
Dwarf planet intumesces before astronomers' gaze
Iain Duncan Smith's Universal Credit: A timeline
NAO slates UK.gov's 'haphazard' sci-tech money-chuck plan
Thursday 10th March 2016 12:55 GMT
Re: Toys for the minister to stand in front of
For that money sharks with frickin' lasers surely?
But seriously BIS does. That resource is called "The Research Councils." But because advice is given it doesn't mean it has to be listened to, for instance if it inconveniently doesn't recommend funding the ministers latest favourite new toy. In fact it might be better to reorganise things so that such advice isn't received in the first place.
Thursday 10th March 2016 11:23 GMT
Where's the recurrent spending?
And if you are buying the toys for the minister to stand in front of where, as the article mentions in passing, where is the money to keep it going when the minister returns to his club in London? in my own area, supercomputing, the real issue is not a lack of toys to play with, it's a lack of skilled individuals to help people use those toys well and the money to fund the day to day running costs. Such people require a unique set of experience and skills, yet the wages available for them are often low for such a skill set (so recruitment is hard), there is often little chance of career progression, and funding such people through grant money is often difficult. Yet without them the capital investment is simple a pile of silicon, metal and plastic sat in the corner ...
State should run power firm spam database, says... competition watchdog
Thursday 10th March 2016 11:05 GMT
Oh for crying out loud
'The UK’s competition regulator wants to see a new database of utility customers set up so they can be bombarded with “targeted marketing”.'
In a time of stupid ideas this is one that truly stands out. I don't want this targeted marketing. I don't want to spend my spare time trawling through the different offers. I couldn't even give a flying one about so called "competition". I just want the right not to be ripped off. Is this so difficult?
Sir Clive Sinclair in tech tin-rattle triumph
Intel talks concurrency and Knights Landing
At least 10 major loyalty card schemes compromised in industry-wide scam
France's 3-month state of emergency lets govt censor the web
BOFH: We're miracle workers. But you want us to fix THAT in 10 minutes?
Think Fortran, assembly language programming is boring and useless? Tell that to the NASA Voyager team
TalkTalk attack: 'No legal obligation to encrypt customer bank details', says chief
White House 'deeply disappointed' by Europe outlawing Silicon Valley
Wednesday 7th October 2015 08:33 GMT
"We are deeply disappointed in today's decision"
Ahhh, diddums ...
"I strongly encourage the Department of Commerce to conclude negotiations on a new agreement with the European Union that allows the free flow of data to continue"
You broke your last toy by being naughty with it, why should you get a new one?
Fiorina: I rushed out HP servers to power NSA snooping. Mwahahaha!
More email misery and pillory for Hillary as FBI starts quizzery
Volkswagen used software to CHEAT on AIR POLLUTION tests, alleges US gov
UK terror law probe stresses 'safeguards' amid MI5 plot claims
Ahmed's clock wasn't a bomb, but it blew up the 'net and Zuckerberg, Obama want to meet him
'To read this page, please turn off your ad blocker...'
PRIMITIVE TOOLS found near MICROSOFT headquarters
Windows 10 climbs to 3.55 per cent market share, Win 8.1 dips
UK.gov will appeal against DRIPA-busting verdict, says minister
Friday 17th July 2015 19:58 GMT
Random Fluctuations in the Cosmos
My word, I agree on something with David Davis! The world gets stranger every day ...
But a beer to the both of you. And good luck to Tom in your deputy leadership challenge - one of the few truly good people left in British Politics, and an excellent music taste as well. What do you think of Royal Blood?
Bernie Sanders wants FCC to probe broadband prices (but wait, is there an election coming?)
Unions call for strike action over 'unusable' Universal Credit IT
It's 2015 and Microsoft has figured out anything can break Windows
A 16 Petaflop Cray: The key to fantastic summer barbecues
Citizens denied chance to vote in local-government IT cockup
Saudis go ape, detain Swedish monkeys at border
Friday 10th April 2015 07:43 GMT 
Are you listening Mr Hammond?
"Sweden's foreign minister criticised Saudi Arabia's human rights record.
Last month, foreign minister Margot Wallström said it was unethical for Sweden to continue with its military co-operation agreement with Saudi Arabia."
Well said. Mr Hammond, are you listening?
Google cracks down on browser ad injectors after shocking study
Thursday 2nd April 2015 07:12 GMT
Re: Unwanted ad injectors aren't part of a healthy ads ecosystem
Disagree. The need for ABP, and I can't understand how people browse without it, is a symptom, it's not the cure. That will come when the advertisers understand that they haven't got a god given right to shove their crap in your face 24,7 whether you want it or not. But it's going to be a chilly day in hades then
SGI sales mushroom with Atomic Weapons Establishment deal
Wednesday 25th March 2015 09:33 GMT
Re: Can someone explain....
Just like paperwork and your desk the computation expands to fill the computer ...
Remember in computational science it is very rare that computers give exact solutions to the real physical problem. Rather approximate solutions to models of reality are what you get, and the game is to get the most accurate solution to the best model that you can solve. 10 years ago the computational facilities could solve certain models to a certain accuracy. 10 years of improvement allows
a) more accurate and complex models to be solved
b) already used models to be solved at higher accuracy
c) a mixture of both
I don't know what kind of models they are solving, but for b) it might be as simple as resolving features in the solution at 1km instead of 5km (c.f. weather forecasting). And the higher accuracy in this case really is very much better - I really don't want these things going kablooey unrequested, and like the poster above I'm interested that this is done from every viewpoint AND with the best accuracy that is currently feasible.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
