NASA wants YOU (to make its Fortran code run faster)
arstechnica.comLink to the competition page: https://herox.com/HPFCC
Do schools still teach FORTRAN? Is there anyone under the age of 50 writing it professionally (not just a little hobby dabbling)? Would someone who is expert in the CFD domain be interested in picking through 30yo code to learn the language and contribute?
I had the dubious pleasure of being assigned to revive some NASA FORTRAN code from 1978 during grad school. FORTRAN 77 was too new, so it was written in FORTRAN 66 style. With vendor extensions, naturally. Fortunately this wasn't CFD code. It was an order of magnitude less complicated. Anyhow, nobody had compiled this thing in 15 years. It took about a month for me to figure out how to make it work, because it wasn't obvious that the garbage I was getting out of it was because I was compiling it wrong. Eventually I found the right flags for gfortran, and it just worked.
So yes, if you count grad students, people are working on FORTRAN for their bread.
I can do that: I usually manage to get the wrong answer really fast...