NASA is seeking help from coders to speed up the software it uses to design experimental aircraft.
It is running a competition that will share $55,000 (£42,000) between the top two people who can make its FUN3D software run up to 10,000 times faster.
The FUN3D code is used to model how air flows around simulated aircraft in a supercomputer.
The software was developed in the 1980s and is written in an older computer programming language called Fortran.
"This is the ultimate 'geek' dream assignment," said Doug Rohn, head of Nasa's transformative aeronautics concepts program that makes heavy use of the FUN3D code.
In a statement, Mr Rohn said the software is used on the agency's Pleiades supercomputer to test early designs of futuristic aircraft.
The software suite tests them using computational fluid dynamics, which make heavy use of complicated mathematical formulae and data structures to see how well the designs work.
Speaking of NASA...a posting on LinkedIn recently showed pictures of dinosaurs sitting at computers with the caption:
dinasours.png (278.55 KiB) Viewed 6580 times
Is this the last team of #FORTRAN developers still working today?
#Lisp #cobol #pascal #ada #matlab
Amusing but had to add the following comment:
NASA called and said:
whaaaa?
Howd we get to Mars?
Major scientific code at NASA and elsewhere still utilize #fortran
For graphics and interactive code, others languages are better and used! However
at machine level ALL code link together easily and can communicate fine
So question is:
Ya got 100,000 lines of great code.
Do you waste time and money perverting it to C++ or some other other language just because...?
why?
Or use the time and money on new or enhanced code and on interface and graphical things in whatever code and then synch and link all codes in whatever language to live and run in peaceful efficient harmony?
Thats what NASA n other major scientific projects/companies/endeavors do.
So it may have been around for 70+ years but still used in many many scientific projects and programs.