Some elements of that report match with the AMS report on the impact of technology on the weather enterprise workforce - #3 by milancurcic, posted previously. In particular the difficulty of finding Fortran programmers, and the problems of running Fortran on GPUs.
I wish, their speculation
It is also possible that as the pool of Fortran developers continues to decrease, the demand for this skill set on legacy code bases across the industry will remain flat for quite some time, meaning increased competition for the relatively few developers with deep Fortran expertise. [emphasis mine] This has the potential to further erode retention and our ability to compete on salary.
which echoes @milancurcic’s takeaway from the AMS report:
- Fortran programmers will likely be better paid as they become more scarce and as the industry takes up a larger fraction of the weather enterprise.
would become true. But in reality, I don’t see it happening.
Judging be other reports such as this one from 2014 (ASCAC WORKFORCE SUBCOMMITTEE LETTER), the government labs in the US face bigger recruitment issues than just a lack of Fortran talent:
[…] In particular, the findings reveal that:
- All large DOE national laboratories face workforce recruitment and retention challenges in the fields within Computing Sciences that are relevant to their mission (termed ASCR-related Computing Sciences in the following findings and the recommendations), including Algorithms (both numerical and non-numerical); Applied Mathematics; Data Analysis, Management and Visualization; Cybersecurity; Software Engineering and High Performance Software Environments; and High Performance Computer Systems.
- Insufficient educational opportunities are available at academic institutions in the ASCR-related Computing Sciences that are most relevant to the DOE mission.
- There is a growing national demand for graduates in ASCR-related Computing Sciences that far exceeds the supply from academic institutions. Future projections indicate an increasing workforce gap and a continued underrepresentation of minorities and females in the workforce unless there is an intervention.
- The exemplary DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (CSGF) program, deemed highly effective in every one of multiple reviews, is uniquely structured and positioned to help provide the future workforce with the interdisciplinary knowledge, motivation, and experiences necessary for contributing to the DOE mission.
- The DOE laboratories have individually developed measures to help recruitment and retention, yet more can be done at the national level to amplify and extend the effectiveness of their locally developed programs
Many sectors of the population are significantly underrepresented in the Computing Sciences.
According to the Taulbee data, in 2014 women comprise a low and declining percentage of computing
graduates, with 17.2% of Computer Science and 18% of all computing doctorates. Less than 2% of computational science doctorates are awarded to Hispanic or African-American students. The fraction of degrees awarded to non-US citizens continues to climb, reaching over 58% of all Computing Science doctoral degrees (Table 5 in the Appendix gives examples). Similar demographic data at the career level reveals a workforce that is mostly male and mostly white.
Concerning the GPU portability aspects, this Twitter thread sharing work presented at SYCLcon contains some food for thought: https://twitter.com/simonmcs/status/1648976667468001281/photo/1 The following two slides are the relevant ones (I hope the authors, Sergi Siso, Andrew Porter, and Rupert Ford don’t mind me posting this here for the sake of our discussion):
