Oh Yea! Reinventing Fortran, our old trusty friend!
Posted: Fri May 05, 2017 8:54 am
Nasa runs competition to help make old Fortran code faster
NASA Tournament Lab
- 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.
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.
NASA Tournament Lab