Re: Interested about number crunching in Ada

[anon@anon.org (anon)]

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@19g2000hsx.googlegroups.com>,  holst <henrikholst80@gmail.com> 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>
>