| HN Mirror

Y	Hacker News new \| ask \| show \| jobs

by hackandthink 1355 days ago

Being curious about the implementation language. Viewing the code is not easy.

If you guess Fortran, you might be right:

(different ICON Project) "The infrastructure, ICON-Land, for this ICON-A land component has been newly designed in a Fortran2008 object-oriented, modular, and flexible way."

https://mpimet.mpg.de/fileadmin/publikationen/Reports/WEB_Bz...

Fortran alive and kicking:

https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-fortran

2 comments

rongopo 1355 days ago

Most of what they do in the Climate simulation arena uses fortran, this case not being an exception, reason being other language would be less efficient --- and thus more climate endangering emissions would be produced. Plotting and data wrangling is another story.

link

origin_path 1355 days ago

They don't use FORTRAN because of efficiency or emissions reductions lol, they use FORTRAN because they always did and the sort of scientists who do modelling rarely see any reason to upgrade their skills or tools.

Programming is something scientists tend to study only as far as needed to get results that look right. This is how the most influential COVID model ended up being a 15,000 line student-quality C program with hundreds of single-letter name global variables.

link

rongopo 1355 days ago

They definitely stick to it, and it might be that they build convenient narratives about it. Mind you that the energy use of climate simulations is not trivial, or do you think such machine can be fed with a typical electric installation from a regular office?

link

marshallward 1355 days ago

Fortran is no longer in ALL CAPS.

link

TheRealKing 1354 days ago

When will people learn it..

link

dunefox 1355 days ago

I had hoped for Julia.

link

rongopo 1355 days ago

If the margins are so tight that 1 day can only produce 2.5 days of simulation, why to lose even a small margin with Julia?