Syllabus

• Week 1

  Introduction and the basics of Fortran

  • Welcome and introduction

    Welcome to the course on Fortran for scientific programming. You will get an introduction to the course and have the opportunity to introduce yourself to us and your fellow participants. Let's make this a lively community!

  • Set up and your first Fortran program

    You learn how to set up your environment to develop Fortran applications. When that is done, you will write a very simple Fortran program, and learn how to compile and run it in the terminal.

  • Data types

    Data types are of course pretty fundamental when you design a program. Fortran supports the data types you would expect, but also complex numbers, which is of course useful for scientific computing.

  • Conditional and iteration statements

    Once you know how to represent your data, you will want to control the flow of your application. In this section, you will learn about Fortran conditional and iteration statements.

  • Procedures

    To write reusable and readable code, you need functions. Fortran has procedures, i.e., functions and subroutines. In this section we will cover the basics, and go into more details in week 2.

  • Basic input and output

    You will learn how to write to standard output, how to read from standard input, and how to work with text files.

  • Next steps

    Here your can find the capstone exercises and some additional material such as a (very) brief introduction to CMake, references and some Fortran related jokes.

• Week 2

  Beyond the basics

  • Introduction to week 2

    Welcome to week 2, here you'll learn more about the concepts introduced in week 1 as well as on data structures such as arrays and user defined types.

  • Arrays

    Vectors and matrices are the bread and butter of scientific computing. In this section, you will learn about arrays in Fortran and the features that make using them very efficient.

  • Procedures in detail

    In week 1 you've already discovered procedures. However, there is a lot more to say about them. You will learn more about argument declaration and special types of procedures.

  • More control flow statements

    Besides if and do statements, Fortran has quite some more control flow statements that can help you write code that is easier to read, or that allows the compiler to generate more efficient applications.

  • File I/O: formatting

    You will learn the details of how to format text-based output.

  • Next steps

    Here you find the capstone exercises and some additional material such as references and some Fortran related jokes. There is also the opportunity to share your favorite stories about bugs you encountered, and hopefully squashed.

• Week 3

  Object-oriented programming

  • Introduction to week 3

    This week you will learn about modules and interfaces, dynamic memory and pointers, type-bound procedures and object-oriented programming.

  • User defined types

    Although user defined types as such are very useful even if you don't do object-oriented programming, they form the basis for classes in Fortran.

  • Modules & interfaces

    Modules help to structure your code so that data types and procedures can be reused across projects. Interfaces can be used to pass procedures as arguments to other procedures which will also lead to more reusable code.

  • Dynamic memory & pointers

    Dynamic memory management is an important aspect of programming. It allows to efficiently deal with available memory resources of your computer.

  • Type-bound procedures and object-oriented programming

    Add type-bound procedures to user defined types, and you get to Fortran's features that support object-oriented programming.

  • Next steps

    You will find the capstone exercises and some additional material such as references and some Fortran related jokes. You can also share how you feel about Fortran's object-oriented programming features.

• Week 4

  Software engineering and performance aspects

  • Introduction to week 4

    In this week you will learn a bit about software engineering and performance aspects of coding.

  • Best practices

    Programming is more than just translating an algorithm into code. Your code should be easy to maintain, your applications easy to use.

  • Performance

    In scientific computing, computational efficiency is very important because you want to be limited by your imagination, not the hardware you're running on.

  • I/O performance

    For some applications, file I/O consumes a substantial part of the runtime of an application. It's therefor quite important to do file I/O right. You will learn about I/O beyond sequential text-based I/O.

  • Next steps

    Here you find the capstone exercises, as well as some additional material such as references and some Fortran related jokes. You can also share your opinion on why Fortran features help compilers.

• Week 5

  Scientific libraries and parallel computing

  • Introduction to week 5

    This week, you will learn about libraries for scientific computing and data formats as well as parallel computing.

  • Libraries for linear algebra

    Many scientific problems can be solved using linear algebra. There are various excellent libraries available and it is important that you are aware of that. Reinventing the wheel can be frustrating for all involvled.

  • HDF5

    HDF5 is a data format specifically designed to store scientific data. A single file can contain multiple data sets, and meta-data is stored in the file itself. HDF5 can be read and written by many applications.

  • Bits & pieces

    The IEEE 754 standard is quite important for scientific computing since it defines how floating point values are handled. For some algorithms it can be useful to manipulate values at the bit level.

  • Parallel programming

    As a language for scientific computing, Fortran offers quite a variety of options to develop parallel programming. Here, you will get a taste of it.

  • Next steps

    Here you find the capstone exercises, as well as some additional material such as references and some Fortran related jokes.

Who will you learn with?