Abstract: In 1951, Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes asked this talk's titular question at the outset of a poem entitled "Harlem." Six years later, IBM mathematician John Backus developed Fortran, the world's first widely used high-level programming language. Backus went on to explore functional programming and to highlight the functional style in his Turing Award lecture in 1977, a year that also demarcates what one might consider the end of the classical era of Fortran. This talk will demonstrate how modern Fortran began to deliver on Backus's functional programming dream, starting with pure procedures in the 1995 standard. The talk will further demonstrate how this style culminated in a powerful and flexible facility for expressing independent iterations via the "do concurrent" construct, which the Fortran standard committee included in Fortran 2008 with the intention to facilitate automatic Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) programming. Fortran 2008 was published in 2010, but it took another decade for compilers to deliver on the promise of automatic GPU offloading. This talk will detail the trials and tribulations of Berkeley Lab's Fortran team in chasing the automatic offloading dream in our Inference-Engine deep learning library and Matcha high-performance computing (HPC) application.
Biography: Damian Rouson is a Senior Scientist and the Group Lead for the Computer Languages and Systems Software (CLaSS) Group at Berkeley Lab. His early career focused on simulating turbulent flows in multiphase, quantum, and magnetohydrodynamic media. He currently researches, develops, and teaches parallel programming models for high-performance computing (HPC) and deep learning. He leads the development of the Caffeine and OpenCoarrays parallel runtime libraries for Fortran compilers and teaches tutorials on the UPC++ template library. He co-authored the textbook Scientific Software Design: The Object-Oriented Way (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and has taught related university courses and tutorials on Fortran 2018 and agile software development. He is an alternate member of the Fortran standards committee and has held staff and faculty positions at the City University of New York, the University of Maryland, the University of Cyprus, the University of Bergen, and Stanford University as well as staff and management positions at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories. He received a 2003-'04 NASA Summer Faculty Fellowship and a 2020-'21 Department of Energy Better Scientific Software Fellowship. He founded and leads Archaeologic Inc. and Sourcery Institute and holds a B.S. from Howard University and a M.S. and a Ph.D. from Stanford University, all in mechanical engineering. He is also a licensed Professional Engineer (P.E.) in the State of California.