“After careful deliberation, NASA has decided to cancel the High Performance Fast Computing Challenge competition it announced six weeks ago.“ The canceled com

“After careful deliberation, NASA has decided to cancel the High Performance Fast Computing Challenge competition it announced six weeks ago.“ The canceled competition would have involved running contestants’ code on a NASA supercomputer. The only logical reason I can think of for restricting the language to Fortran would be security concerns. Limiting submissions to one, well-understood and possibly safer language would limit the attack surface. But they canceled the whole thing anyway, again probably due to security concerns. In any case, yes Fortran codes are still around. The BLAS and LAPACK libraries are implemented in Fortran, which means that Fortran code is at the foundations of a ton of numerical software (e.g. MATLAB, NumPy, R, probably Julia, probably a lot of neural net libraries, etc). Any new HPC chip always comes with an optimizing Fortran compiler, we saw this with Nvidia GPUs for example). There are two reasons why Fortran is still used: (1) decades of work has gone into implementing numerical optimizations in these libraries. I am not just talking about machine-oriented optimizations, I am referring to higher level mathematical tricks that require deep domain specific expertise in things like linear algebra as well as a very strong handle on managing floating-point error. Extensive testing has gone into those libraries, and the continued validity of that testing depends on the language standard, compiler implementation, and compiler optimization levels. There is simply no value in rewriting all of this code in another language, given the enormous cost and risk. (2) older professors just prefer Fortran because they know it, and grad students have to use it because their profs use it, and front-line experts have to use it if they want to work on making enhancements to the imoortsnt existing Fortran libraries.