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The code in question is called "FUN3D" and was first developed in the 1980s. It's still an important part of the agency's computational fluid dynamics (CFD) capability, and had its most recent release in September 2016.
The agency is now sponsoring a competition with the aim of getting it to go at least 10 times faster. If you can crank it up to ten thousand times faster – without any loss of accuracy – all the better.
Michael Hetle, program executive at NASA's Transformative Aeronautics Concepts Program (TACP) explains that "some concepts are just so complex, it's difficult for even the fastest supercomputers to analyse these models in real time. Achieving a speed-up in this software by orders of magnitude hones the edge we need to advance our technology to the next level".
[Update: Original story title was taken directly from the referenced article; updated to remove condescension. --martyb]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @10:58PM (5 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @11:02PM (2 children)
Aw, forget it, not FORTRAN. Greybeards not intereseted. "Modern" Fortran is bad enough, but Ruby??? Really???
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @11:12PM (1 child)
you forgot the good bit -- down at the bottom:
This material is declared a work of the U.S. Government and is not subject to copyright protection in the United States.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @11:17PM
No, it's classified instead. But you should totally treat it like pubic domain code and get locked up in Trump Tower where your pussy will be grabbed daily.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday May 05 2017, @01:46AM
Of course no foreign power would ever succeed to bypass those rules and get their own copy while pretending to compete..
Just waiting for the "I didn't have the source so I made my own version which uses a unique approach which is 20 times faster" :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @12:04PM
Great! Another good reason not to have to travel there and have my body violated when entering the country.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @11:01PM (14 children)
How about fuck you, NASA? If you want help fixing your shit, you can shove it back up your ass.
We greybeards from the 1980s have had enough of your imperial terrorist agenda. You didn't end the pointless wars when we told you to end the pointless wars. You went right ahead with your plans to invade as many countries as you could get away with because they were poorly defended and full of oil for you to exploit. So we're refusing to help you now.
Burn in hell, Terrorist States of America.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @11:14PM (10 children)
... what?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @11:20PM (9 children)
Goddamn it how hard is this concept to understand: the same people who are old enough to have Fortran experience are also old enough to be war protesters who wouldn't help the federal government for any reason whatsoever.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday May 04 2017, @11:28PM
Wow ... that's a stretch.
Thanks for context, I guess...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Roger Murdock on Thursday May 04 2017, @11:30PM (1 child)
I think the "What?" comment was more about what on earth you think NASA has to do with starting wars and invading countries for oil. Although to be fair I haven't read NASA's mission statement.
(Score: 2) by mmcmonster on Friday May 05 2017, @02:22PM
Although to be fair I haven't read NASA's mission statement.
It's called mission creep.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @01:29AM (4 children)
That is most retarded. Feel free to protest making roads as well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @02:31AM (3 children)
You're the retard who can't comprehend the difference between constructive (roads) and destructive (war).
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday May 05 2017, @05:43AM
I double-checked after reading the GP: we are talking NASA, not the NSA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @05:44AM (1 child)
So you associate NASA with the later?
Pathetic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @02:09PM
It's not too hard to research. http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB509/ [gwu.edu]
(Score: 2) by number6x on Friday May 05 2017, @02:33PM
Hippy greybeards from the 1960's, possibly.
Greybeards from the 1980's didn't have any wars to protest. Grenada was over too quickly.
Besides, young people in the 1980's were too busy selling junk bonds, looking out for #1 and learning that 'greed is good'.
The 1980's was the era of young college republicans, greed, cocaine and born again salvation.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @11:23PM (2 children)
The wars are not pointless. If that were the case there would be more wars.
Control of resources is the name of the game, and the US does it better than any
other country on earth. However NASA has nothing to do with this, and if you were
not an idiot you'd know that.
Anyway, if you don't like it, tough shit, pussyboy. What are you going to actually DO
about it other than whine ? Nothing. Like I said : tough shit, you useless worthless meaningless
pussy.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @11:47PM
Usually what happens when talented people find themselves living under an oppressive regime, they emigrate somewhere else and do work which benefits another country, and the effect is called Brain Drain. If instead they sit on their hands and refuse to work for the oppressive regime and do nothing, the effect is called Brain Waste.
Fuck Nasa. Don't help America. Brain Waste this shithole to death.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by butthurt on Friday May 05 2017, @09:01PM
> [...] NASA has nothing to do with [war]
Earlier commenters noted that there are export restrictions on this software. A probable reason is that computational fluid dynamics can be used to model nuclear explosions.
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a211364.pdf [dtic.mil]
http://impact.ref.ac.uk/CaseStudies/CaseStudy.aspx?Id=17855 [ref.ac.uk]
Whether that's NASA's intention here, I can't say. They do collaborate with the U.S. military, however.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @11:40PM (7 children)
This is either a PR stunt or a hope to find a talented overeager student with a free summer to invest in this.
Come on NASA, there are highly skilled professionals out here (like me!) who can make a Fortran code 10x faster with modest resources, but we need to eat and send our kids to college. Shame on NASA!
(Score: 3, Funny) by its_gonna_be_yuge! on Friday May 05 2017, @12:15AM (2 children)
Yeah, that was my first impression as well. It's hard to imagine a "summer of FORTRAN code love" by unpaid interns.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @01:12AM
There must be a few kids left who haven't experienced police brutality firsthand, aren't on the no-fly list, haven't had their minty linux seized by the fbi, right? Gotta be someone who is still naive enough to work for the feds!
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday May 05 2017, @09:16PM
> unpaid interns
One of the links says that winners can win "up to $55,000".
https://herox.com/HPFCC [herox.com]
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Friday May 05 2017, @01:36AM (2 children)
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @05:30AM
I'm sure there are plenty of overeager students who would invest a free summer for a chance at the $55K in prize money.
True, but their schedule would look something along the lines of
Week1: Try to learn FORTRAN, bitch loudly about FORTRAN and its limitations, try to grok existing codebase in said language..
Week2: Bitch about what little of the code they've grokked in Week1, make sarky remarks on forums/IRC about the code and its original programmers
Week3: Re-implement their vision of what the code should really be like, and what the code should really do, in JavaScript/Rust/Go/whatever .. and, as they're all wunderkinder nowadays they'll have the code done and dusted by day2, week3, then they'll crow about how superior their new code is vs the old stuff on forums/IRC, then slack off the rest of the week...
Week4: Testing? what do you mean?, what is this testing thing that you speak of? (I once had to deal [read: bug fix/rewrite] with the output of a wunderkind who couldn't get his little head round the idea that his task was to re-implement an existing FORTRAN codebase in a.n.other language, not fucking with the algorithms, not decide that the algorithms were somehow 'wrong' and fixing them... his improvements showed up when we ran the test data-sets through his code and compared the results to those produced by the old code, he was so cock-sure of himself he'd never tested that his code gave the right answers with real data, just tested that it worked with his idea of test data..)
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Friday May 05 2017, @11:41AM
This has been on the rise for the last decade or so:
1) big company or agency offers "YUGE PRIZE IF YOU SOLVE THIS PROBLEM!!!".
2) collect all ideas
3) give contract to $$ favourite provider.
It is $55k in *prizes*. In otherwords, after they decide someone is good enough they will shell out some small parcels.
These scams should be illegal, ESPECIALLY from the government. We are paying for them ALREADY.
From a company, there's a sucker born every minute....but then again, there's alot of it around.
TL;DR A scam to get some market rate work done cheap. (Yes, I would bid $1M minimum for that job).
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday May 05 2017, @02:09PM
But, they're offering $50K in prizes! You could, like, coast on that with 'za and video games for years. You might even be able to score some headphones so mom and dad won't stomp on the floor so much when the action in the basement gets too loud. On the other hand, if you're a Fortran programmer mom and dad probably can't hear you anyway (batteries on the hearing aids ran out).
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 04 2017, @11:55PM (2 children)
Put the code up on GitHub where it will be forked 1,500 times. No one will contribute any optimizations, but there will be lots of forks. Most of the forks will be resume padding by idiots who want to try to claim to have worked for NASA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @12:56AM (1 child)
Nah, give it to Micro$oft. They'll DRM it so bad it'll BSOD.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @12:07PM
And have NASA pay for it every time they use it.
(Score: 2) by its_gonna_be_yuge! on Friday May 05 2017, @12:08AM
I heard Leah Rowe is looking for a new gig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @02:16AM
Sounds like Silicon Valley startups have found a new whiteboard challenge!
Hah just kidding, it's a homework assignment, but don't knock yourself out trying to make this code ten times faster. We just want to see how you work.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Friday May 05 2017, @08:58AM (2 children)
There is somewhat more relevant information over at HeroX with all the rules and hoops you have to jump thru beyond just being a US citizen.
https://herox.com/HPFCC [herox.com]
Anyway ...
FUN3D design software so it runs ten to 10,000 times faster on the Pleiades supercomputer without any decrease in accuracy.
That answered my first question, otherwise they could just have built faster hardware and the code would have "run" faster without even looking at it.
“This is the ultimate ‘geek’ dream assignment,” said Doug Rohn
Sure cause nothing says fun and geek like writing code in Fortran ...
Examples of modifications would be simplifying a single subroutine so that it runs a few milliseconds faster. If this subroutine is called millions of times, this one change could dramatically speed up the entire program’s runtime.
I wonder if this is really going to be code optimization or if it will be a maths optimization problem. One would think by now that the code is fairly optimized as it is, even tho I will never know why my foreign spying eyes.
If one looks at the rule page over at HeroX it seems more like this is going to be about module and math optimization then finding little coding errors, those should have been few to non-existing already. Which then becomes even harder as the deadline is just a month and a half or so away as I write this. Good luck getting into the code, replace sections of it with something shiny and new and then hope it runs faster then before. All without access to the supercomputer ... cause you are not allowed to use those unless you own one yourself that you have in your basement.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @12:08PM
tfa is another great candidate for the "tickler file" -- this topic should be automatically added to the submissions list around the time that the "contest" ends...with a note to Eds or others that followup could be interesting. Then we can discuss how it worked out for NASA and for the FORTRAN programming elite.
My guess? Something from HAKMEM will save the day http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/HAKMEM.html [catb.org]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @01:44PM
I am a FORTRAN expert, or was 20 years ago, and I saw this and thought that it would be fun to dig into the code and see if I could identify any low hanging fruit. However, this is Fortran (not FORTRAN), which I have not ever attempted to code in, so maybe not as fun, but I thought I'd take a peek at it anyway. Then, it turns out to be a big PITA to just access to the code, so now I'm not so interested anymore.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @11:48AM (1 child)
But sharing $55000 isn't worth my personal time. I spend enough time coding on my day job. The time it would take to analyse this code and and properly use TDD to develop it just isn't cost effective.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Friday May 05 2017, @02:17PM
They're looking for 1337 coders to deliver million dollar software for $50K, which by the time it ever got to you would already have had the government's cut of 60% of your work pre-removed, so that in the end you would have delivered incredible value for less than minimum wage. In 1980. And then the code (which the fine print will of course give NASA full rights to) will be handed via a sweetheart deal to a 3rd party contractor owned and run by an old chum of the NASA director, who'll turn around and bill NASA $100 million for licensing it back to the agency. A friend of the contractor's will "gift" a sweet condo in Barbados to the director of NASA, and everything will be on the up-and-up and everyone will be in the clear.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @12:27PM (1 child)
I doubt NASA is honest, and believe they intentionally misreport space.
My hypothesis is that they cannot really go to space, and same applies for the other space agencies. That's why they keep talking with big words about space, to keep alive the impression that they are experts in something impossible to verify, until recently.
They promote "we humans evolved and we started exploring space 70 years ago" but does the place you live in look like a space-age place? 70 years, really?
Indicators of NASA trying to discharge their bill include the "bubbles in space" incident, forcing them in retreat. NASA sells this as "private initiative will take over" giving the stage to "people on Mars" and "drones mining asteroids", even though the actual real-life machinery and labs do not look as convincing as the accompanying artistic impressions of machinery and labs. This is the only constant element for the 70 years of humanity's golden space age.
"Going to space" is a gold rush that involves acquiring a huge strategic potential and unlimited resources, and swarms of space plumbers, engineers, colonists, navigators, craftsmen, healers and more in the most epic mobilization humanly performed.
Human pioneering is an unstoppable urge. If it was possible for a space rush to ever happen, it would have, because humans have been ripe for this for 70 years now. Instead, humans only get a handful of bad pictures. NASA never went to space, and now with the internet it is becoming impossible for them to back their claim that they "go to space" and this is becoming more and more obvious.
(Score: 3, Touché) by turgid on Friday May 05 2017, @08:28PM
The Farce is strong with this one :-)
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].