[throwawaymaths]

actually I think it sort of was, I remember berkeley squeezing a ton of perf out of their cray for a crazy task because it was easy to specialize some wild semi-sparse matrix computations onto an architecture with strange memory/cache bottlenecks, while being guaranteed that the results are still okay.

[leephillips]

Yes. Remember that the four languages that have been used for very high performance computing are Fortran, C, C++, and Julia:

https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/julia-joins-petaflop-cl...

For large-scale physics simulations, Fortran or Julia are the obvious choices.