Re: Interested about number crunching in Ada

Even though Ada does have a few packages that are interesting in
numeric code. The idea that any language such as Ada is better than
FORTRAN will not go over very well. Except for college project or
class assignments, that might give you something to do. But in the
real world, it will not fly. To fully understand this try looking at the
history of SISAL (see below for definition).

There are a number of other High Performance Computing (HPC)
languages that were design back in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. But
most have since died off because the lack of funding and previous
work done in FORTRAN and C. LISP has stay around but it role
was altered to mostly non-HPC status.

As for Ada:

First, is the acceptance of Ada. In the world of mathematic FORTRAN
was design to and rules that universe. Non-GNU FORTRAN compilers
are optimized for mathematic while Ada is not. And until that changes
most high performance numeric programmers will not accept Ada in that
world. Outside of FORTRAN they use pure "C" and maybe Lisp. They
also say no to "c++" or any other languages.

Second, most programmer do not want to spend the 100s to 1000s of
hours to translate or convert the libraries that are written in FORTRAN
to any other language including Ada. That is around 50+ years worth of
library source code. And that does not include the time and expense of
getting the copyright and or Software Patents rights to do the
translation. Plus, translating any code from one language to another is
simply boring for most programmers.

Plus, it is a lot easier to write and understand code that is wriiten in
the same language. So, for libraries that are coded in FORTRAN means
the project languages needs to be in FORTRAN. And that's the way HPC
committees like it.

Now, for High Performance Computing projects, well it hard to find open
source projects that deal with mathematic. In todays world, normally
you must be hired and move up to the position in HPC. Jobs in the
fields of Aerospace, Weather, Oceanic Research, and Medical are some
of the primary fields. All of these require knowledge in other fields that
are not commonly known to most programmers. Nornally, it people in
these specialize fields that become programmers and they use what is
commonly use for programming aka FORTRAN or C.

Some of the not so commonly known job fields are Web Servers, and
Neural Networks but these are not driving by higher performance
mathematic, but by Database and File Accessing.

But for the best information on High Performance Mathematic
Computing, check with your local college or university computer
department in a couple of weeks after the fall semester starts. Give
a few days for the school to calm down into the semester routine
before asking.

With the newer computers having dual processors you would think that
most would want to see HPC coding on these desk top. But business
owner are hard to adopt new program or computing paradigms. And
scientists want 16 to 512 processors aka a supercomputer to play with
so to them a dual processors is only building blocks toward that design.
And with a price tag to match they are hard to the average programmer to
buy or build.


As for SISAL (definition):

SISAL is programming language that automatically parallelizes code for
parallel computers, but still works on single processors. it is a
functional language that is hightly efficient for numerical computation.
The Sisal project was based until the early 2000's, at the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory, but it has been canceled there. You can
still find the source code for SISAL on the internet.




In <1187235764.909133.180650@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, holst <henrikholst80@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
Hi!

I have stumbled upon Ada95 and I have found that a recent addition was
made to the language standard [1]. An addition I, a student of
scientific computing, are highly interested in.

What is the best online resource to get into the core of the new high
performance vector and matrix features? Does there exist some book
(yet) which covers this area? Or any other field which might be
related to me (concurrency, Fortran bindings etc.)? I know C and
Pascal good and I have a good start into Fortran 90/95.

I applicate your time and help. I hope that, with a push in the right
direction I will be a productive "Ada numerics hacker" in a near
future. :-)

[1] http://www.ada-auth.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/AIs/AI-00296.TXT

--
Henrik Holst, Sweden
http://www.nada.kth.se/~holst/contact.shtml
Number of productive hours in C++: <zero> of <too many>


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