[ljdursi]

Oh, sure. I don't think anyone should start rewriting old codes; but as new projects start, I think we have a lot more options out there than we did 10 years ago, and it's worth looking closely at them before starting, rather than defaulting to something. Especially since, once you start, you're probably pretty much locked into whatever you chose for a decade or so.

[sampo]

So, say you wanted to write a weather model, or engineering fluid mechanics model. Which options (besides MPI) you would look at?

[ljdursi]

Chapel has been used for incompressible moving-grid fluid dynamics, so it's certainly feasible. For that problem the result was ~33% the lines of code of the MPI version. There is a performance hit, but the issues are largely understood; if (say) a meteorological centre were to put its weight behind it, a lot of things could get done.

It's also pretty easy to see how UPC or co-array fortran (which is part of the standard now, so isn't going anywhere any time soon) would work. They'd fall closer to MPI in complexity and performance.

You couldn't plausibly do big 3d simulations in Spark today; that's way outside of what it was designed for. Now analysing the results, esp of a suite of runs, that might be interesting.