Advanced Modeling & Simulation (AMS) Seminar Series

NASA and the Future of Fortran

Speaker: Thomas Clune, Computational & Information Sciences & Technology Office, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

April 28, 2015

Seminar Slide Deck (PDF-94KB)

Abstract

The Fortran programming language remains quite popular in a number of scientific and engineering communities and continues to serve a mission-critical role in many NASA projects. At the same time, many long-time Fortran users are largely unaware of the process by which new features are introduced in the language and how they as users might influence that process. My presentation will begin with a very high-level description of the committees and processes that govern the evolution of the language standard. I will then discuss some of the powerful new features that have been introduced in the Fortran 2003 and 2008 standards, as well as capabilities that should be expected in the upcoming Fortran 2015 standard. I conclude with a discussion about how NASA can, and should, maximize its influence on the standard committee to ensure features we need are given appropriate priority. As NASA’s representative on the US Fortran standards committee, I wish to engage the NASA Fortran community and properly reflect the diverse interests of the agency.

Biography

Dr. Thomas (Tom) Clune has recently joined the US Fortran Standards committee as NASA’s primary representative. Dr. Thomas Clune also serves as the Head of the Advanced Software Technology Group (ASTG) within Computational & Information Sciences & Technology Office (CISTO) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). The ASTG provides software technology support to Goddard researchers—primarily in the Earth Science Division. Areas of support include high performance computing (parallelization and hardware accelerators), Big Data, advanced software design, and automated software regression/unit testing. Primary clients include the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO), Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), and NASA Unified WRF (NU-WRF). Dr. Clune is also the lead developer of pFUnit, an open-source software testing framework for applications using Fortran and MPI.