JDeveloper and Intel Python

The JDeveloper environment looks good. Nice work Oracle, and some of the Borland classic JBuilder. This tool look more like how I’d use an IDE. I’ve been looking at other technologies for computer development, and a recent Intel offering (for personal use free) is the MKL backed Intel Python. It needs at least an SSE4.2 supporting chip, but does have all that is needed to run the development on Xeon Phi Knights Landing. 72 cores and 144 vector processing AVX-512 engines. Multi Tflops stuff. For the developer this is perhaps the easiest way to start HPC, as through Cython and eventually C, the best performance can be had. Maybe FPGAs will help, and tools are available for that too. I’ve seen some good demonstrations, and maybe some clients with complex or hard problems would need this.

All this parallel stuff got me thinking of Kahan sums, and simulation of incompressibles by having a high speed of sound in a compressible, and the doing a compulsory diffusion to damp oscillation, and a pressure impulse (Pa s) handling of inertial failure of containers. It might reduce the non-locality of certain simulations, and actually act to simulate pressure hammer effects.

I’ve also recently got back into the idea of using Free Pascal for some of my projects maybe. There is now good JNI support, and even JVM targeting. I maen it’s very possible to use C for this kind of thing, but the FPC IDE and Lazarus are quick to build, with incremental unit compilation and many other features which make it good competition for general coding. Some would think it old hat, but the ease of use is excellent with much type checking, and no insistence on everything being a class. Units are very modular that way. The support for quite a few Pascal flavours is also good.