专业人士分析C与Fortran在科学计算方面的优劣.docVIP

One of the physics faculty members mentioned to me that the Engineering school is considering changing Eng 120 to teach C++ instead of Fortran and that you were soliciting comments about this with regard to physics students. Even though I am not associated with the university, I wanted to contribute my thoughts, which come from a commercial as well as a research perspective. Perhaps they will be of some value to you.????As you know, Quetzal Computational Associates specializes in computational science. We currently have projects computational physics, earth sciences, and agriculture for clients which include DoE and DoD laboratories as well as commercial clients as diverse as hazardous waste companies and grain companies. During the last year, we have developed numerical methods and codes based on them for modeling contaminant flow in porous media, modeling the structural mechanics of resonant sonic drilling rigs, modeling bistatic ground penetrator radar propagation in partially saturated soils, modeling solid dynamics at high strain rates, modeling the phenological development of corn and soy beans, modeling solar insolation in the photosynthetically active spectrum based on first principle atmospheric physics, and developed neural networks for the detection of dust clouds from satellite imagery.????One of our largest computational physics projects is the development of advanced methods for modeling solid dynamics based on first principle physics. This is a multi-year, multi-million dollar project. This code numerically solves the partial differential equations for continuum solid dynamics using a hybrid finite volume/finite element technique, coupled to advanced equations of state and constitutive models for the solids and fluids in the calculation. This code and others we work with are huge number crunching codes, a modest 3d simulation will take 100 or more hours of Cray C-90 time to complete a single calculation. By any standard, they are amongst the large