[J3] [EXTERNAL] Re: Comments on 23-146

[Jeff Hammond]

On 28Feb 2023, at 10:28 PM, Van Snyder via J3 <j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org<mailto:j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org>> wrote:

External email: Use caution opening links or attachments

On Tue, 2023-02-28 at 05:40 +0000, Jeff Hammond via J3 wrote:

If I argued that WG5 should do something because of the membership size of WG21, I’d expect to be treated with derision, which is not an uncommon event at our meetings, I might add.

I didn't argue that we should look to Ada for useful ideas because WG9 is bigger than WG5.

My remark that WG9 has more members was a response to Jeff's assertion that Ada has "faded into history.”

Regardless of its significance in general, you have asserted that Ada has made valuable contributes to parallel language design.  Can you provide some examples of the successful use of Ada parallelism in applications that are not autonomous robots or real-time systems (since neither is particularly relevant to Fortran)?

If Ada made the right decisions about parallelism, then I would expect it to be demonstrably successful in this context.

Jeff

PS In case you missed it, I’d like you to respond to what I wrote Malcolm this morning:

When I look for more recent topical references, e.g. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/249100.249112<https://nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdl.acm.org%2Fdoi%2Fabs%2F10.1145%2F249100.249112&data=05%7C01%7Cjehammond%40nvidia.com%7C86e6d7b18a434b57ac0008db19640e0e%7C43083d15727340c1b7db39efd9ccc17a%7C0%7C0%7C638131689761380053%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=2oFWWFGlV1TApXc6Q6lcAhyQDsowqzay3%2Bj0Xaq072w%3D&reserved=0> (attached), I see evidence that Ada 83 decisions were made without consideration of parallel architectures, as indicated by the following quote from a 1988 paper:

"Though Ada is now available on many uniprocessor systems, there is still little experience with truly multiprocessor Ada implementations- This experience will grow rapidly in the near future, and it will probably prove the benefits of high level language features for the developments of new methods that successfully exploit the possibilities of parallel architectures.”

The authors - writing in 1997 - add:

The open question remains: why is Ada almost unused to develop parallel programs? We would like to suggest that the primary problem is related to the efficiency and performance issues.

and

The research by Goforth et al. was a very typical mainstream Ada application - control of autonomous telerobotic system - which is rather atypical for parallel scientific computing applications.

Are there better references on the topic that don’t require me to buy more books?  I am struggling to find accounts of successful applications of Ada’s parallelism in domains that have non-zero overlap with Fortran’s.


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