Why python???

[Basile STARYNKEVITCH]

>>>>> "John" == John J Lee <jjl at pobox.com> writes:

[...]

    John> "Michael Peuser" <mpeuser at web.de> writes:

    Michael>> Same argument holds for supercomputing as well. I may be
    Michael>> wrong but I doubt that the ASCIs will ever see much
    Michael>> Python in their production lifetime.

    John> ASICs, you mean?  Well, no, but so what?  I don't think
    John> anybody has ever *claimed* that Python is suitable for that
    John> kind of application.


No, ASCI are big US government (DoE or DoD) supercomputers (used
notably for nuclear weapons computations).

However, contrarily to Michael's belief, it won't surprise me at all
that some big numerical computations are driven by scripting languages
(scripts which call big number crunching primitives coded in C or C++
or Fortran). At least in Europe, several number crunching applications
are driven by scripts. Of course, a huge fraction of the CPU time (ie
>= 98%) is spend in numerical routines coded in Fortran or C. Only a
tiny fraction of the work is spent in interpreting scripts.

I don't know if the ASCI boxes are running numerical computations
driven by Python (or Ruby) scripts, but obviously they could (and
sometimes similar applications are designed around a scripting
language).


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