Introduction to the course

Welcome to this course on Fortran for scientific computing. So why would you want to learn Fortran in the first place? Well, it’s a language that’s specifically designed with scientific computing in mind. So it’s easy to develop scientific applications. Also, it will give you a very decent performance just out of the box. Those are compelling reasons to use Fortran as a programming language for scientific computing. It’s actually a pretty old language. But it has evolved over the decades and embraced new ideas and new paradigms. And we will be discussing the latest Fortran standard, which is Fortran 2018. In week one, you’ll learn how to set up your own development environment.

And you will also be covering the basics of the Fortran programming language. In week two, we will go more in-depth into the concepts of Fortran and learn more about those. Week three will concentrate mostly on object-oriented programming with Fortran. While week 4 is concerned with software engineering issues, but mostly, with performance, which is, of course, very important in scientific computing. In week five will be covering scientific libraries. So basically, it’s no good to reinvent the wheel. So you should be aware that there are many scientific libraries available in the Fortran ecosystem. We’ll also discuss parallel programming a little bit, not in depth, but just to give you an idea of what’s possible with Fortran. Each week, there are capstone exercises.

And those are, in fact, the most important thing, which you should do because they’re open exercises, which have been selected to be somewhat challenging and somewhat interesting from a scientific perspective. And we hope that you will enjoy those. Those are the best learning opportunities, actually. OK, so let’s get started. We hope you will have some fun and that definitely you learn something that’s useful for you in your career.