I am an academic researcher working primarily in high-performance scientific computing, with a focus on numerical methods and large-scale simulations (HPC environments, CPU/GPU clusters).
I would like to ask whether there is currently an active Slack workspace associated with the Fortran-lang / Modern Fortran community. I have seen references to a Slack channel in older discussions, but I have not been able to locate a valid invitation link.
If the Slack workspace is still active, I would appreciate any guidance on how to request an invitation.
Additionally, I would like to ask about the current role of Slack within the community: for HPC-oriented users, is Slack still used for technical discussion and quick exchanges, or has most interaction effectively migrated to Discourse and GitHub?
Thank you very much for your time and for your continued work on supporting Modern Fortran in scientific and HPC contexts.
For HPC context not Fortran specific go to HPCSocial https://hpc.social/ very cool community.
For Fortran specific I think the discourse is probably the best place. Moving conversation away from here could be detrimental to the community. I’d say that if you want to chat with someone you can use the chat function here and/or creating group messages.
I don’t know which Slack you are referring to, but there was a Slack channel for GFortran developers which has been migrated to a Mattermost (a free alternative to Slack) instance a few years ago, and is managed by @JerryD .
I agree with @jorgeg in his encouragement to use this Discourse, because:
It’s been my experience that activity for more specialised topics quickly stagnates when it’s scatted across different communities and technologies (Slack, Mattermost, Matrix, etc.), unless it’s centred around a specific project that many are involved in (e.g., the development of a compiler).
There are already a lot of “scientific computing” people here, and at least a few who worked or are working on HPC systems (@jorgeg and myself, for example). They may be interested in the discussions but unwilling to join (yet) another community.
Others who are not working on HPC systems may still be interested and able to contribute to discussions with their Fortran expertise here.
There’s the option of creating chat groups if you feel something is too sensitive to discuss in public. However, I would always encourage a more open discussion, as it may be very helpful to others in the long run and you’ll get input from more people.
If scientific computing/HPC ends up as a very frequently discussed topic, there’s alway the option of creating a new category in this Discourse to stay organised.
There is https://society-rse.org/ and they have a slack presence and a Fortran channel. Here is some blurb from their site. “The Society of Research Software Engineering was founded on the belief that a world which relies on software must recognise the people who develop it. Our mission is to establish a research environment that recognises the vital role of software in research. We work to increase software skills across everyone in research, to promote collaboration between researchers and software experts, and to support the creation of an academic career path for Research Software Engineers.”
