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mjohnson mjohnson is online now
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Join Date: Jun 2004
Location: Los Alamos, NM
Posts: 1,765
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Originally Posted by mjohnson View Post
I'm sure it isn't exclusive, but Fortran is still used in the US DOE supercomputers - for decades hanging around near or atop the "fastest computer" rankings.

I am simple country metallurgist so the closest I ever got was to beta test/break one of the CFD codes on the, then fastest, "Blue Mountain" computer in 1998(?). I guess it was novel in that it could play with other multiphysics codes and run on tens of thousands of processing cores. Fancy it was, but I can break anything through simple incompetence...

We have Stanislaw Ulam's slide rule, used in his foundational work in developing the H-bomb, in our museum. I'll grab a pic of the display when I'm working there on Thursday.
Popped in this morning...



And now I guess I should always learn to use one - I actually loved the fun exercises the ancient prof made us do in chemical thermodynamics, using numbers covering over 40 orders of magnitudes with fractional powers and other fun things, only in our heads or on at best a scratchpad just to get a good guess. Understanding exponents was critical, and we got pretty darn close!
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Old 09-17-2024, 01:48 PM
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