Scientific computing under Unix (was Re: Help us defend ...)

[George Seibel%Kollman]

In article <20268 at bu-cs.BU.EDU> bzs at bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) writes:
>
>Unix is the premiere system for compute intensive areas, such as the
>sciences using Fortran. The reason is the vast range of power a
>program written to run under Unix presents. As I said, a program
>developed on a small, affordable PC or workstation can be copied and
>re-run on huge compute engines.

Barry, thanks for an excellent posting overall, but I have to comment
on the fragment above.  Our research group does mainly heavy number
crunching and related code development, mostly in fortran.  I've developed
scientific applications in fortran on seven different flavors of unix,
and *none* of them had a compiler or debugger as good as the ones found
on VMS in terms of efficiency of generated code, helping pinpoint bugs
in user code, and being bug-free themselves.  Unix provides an excellent
software development environment in general, *if you know how to use it*,
but it tends to be lacking in fortran support.  After the fourth or fifth
time you've spent hours hammering on some fortran bug under Unix, only to
find it five minutes after porting the whole mess to VMS, your opinions
start to get colored, ya know?  If you think this is another "VMS is better
than Unix" posting, relax.  I'll still take my Sun/Convex any day, thanks,
but here's the point:  If Unix *is* going to be the hot banana for cpu
intensive simulation work, it's going to need good fortran support.  The
BSD attitude way back when was apparently something like "lets give them
a really lousy fortran compiler!  Then maybe fortran will just go away!"
Well, now there are a whole lot of people who think that Unix is not the
way to go for their work.  We have a Public Relations problem here, and
better fortran support will help win over a lot of people who make the
buy decisions.

George Seibel
UCSF