3 ms·

I got this book when I was 4. Loved it to bits. It even had a crafting project of making a PC mockup with paper and glue (which I did). I remember reading abo

I got this book when I was 4. Loved it to bits. It even had a crafting project of making a PC mockup with paper and glue (which I did). I remember reading about how everything's gonna have a microprocessor in it, and thinking it's bullshit, surely that's a leap too far. Fast forward to 2019, after I got a math PhD and was fixing a small bug in Google's sparse SVD library... in Fortran. Thanks, Professor. You left quite an impression on me.

Bostonian 5y ago
Has Google open-sourced this sparse SVD library? I have not heard before of the big tech companies using Fortran.
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  This probably doesn’t count as deliberate use, but GotoBLAS and OpenBLAS still include Fortran code as a baseline. Not sure to which parts of it are actuallu used, but some of them certainly are.
- romwell 5y ago
  Google has hired R. M. Larsen, who wrote PROPACK[1], and uses it internally. A heck of a lot of computation is still powered by Fortran. Ever used SciPy / NumPy? Deep down, FORTRAN powers it, via BLAS/LAPACK[2] A few years back in Cadence, we were still running a lot of FORTRAN code for computational lithography. Not only it's fast (and parallelizable), there are many algorithms that had been fine-tuned over the many years that you can reuse. Say, we needed to pick a gradient descent implementation for an algorithm that used it. Guess what language the L-BFGS[3] implementation we ended up using was written in - no need, it's FORTRAN, from the year 1983. [1] http://sun.stanford.edu/~rmunk/PROPACK/ http://sun.stanford.edu/~rmunk/PROPACK/ [2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7496547/does-python-scipy-need-blas https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7496547/does-python-scip... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited-memory_BFGS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited-memory_BFGS

3 ms·

I got this book when I was 4. Loved it to bits. It even had a crafting project of making a PC mockup with paper and glue (which I did). I remember reading abo

by romwell 5y ago

Bostonian 5y ago
Has Google open-sourced this sparse SVD library? I have not heard before of the big tech companies using Fortran.
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  This probably doesn’t count as deliberate use, but GotoBLAS and OpenBLAS still include Fortran code as a baseline. Not sure to which parts of it are actuallu used, but some of them certainly are.
- romwell 5y ago
  Google has hired R. M. Larsen, who wrote PROPACK[1], and uses it internally. A heck of a lot of computation is still powered by Fortran. Ever used SciPy / NumPy? Deep down, FORTRAN powers it, via BLAS/LAPACK[2] A few years back in Cadence, we were still running a lot of FORTRAN code for computational lithography. Not only it's fast (and parallelizable), there are many algorithms that had been fine-tuned over the many years that you can reuse. Say, we needed to pick a gradient descent implementation for an algorithm that used it. Guess what language the L-BFGS[3] implementation we ended up using was written in - no need, it's FORTRAN, from the year 1983. [1] http://sun.stanford.edu/~rmunk/PROPACK/ http://sun.stanford.edu/~rmunk/PROPACK/ [2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7496547/does-python-scipy-need-blas https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7496547/does-python-scip... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited-memory_BFGS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited-memory_BFGS