Hacker News Reader

Comment by analognoise | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone in the scientific computing ecosystem use Macs?

I can't think of...any program in that sphere that aren't Windows or Linux?

Sadly, yes. I've clients who still prefer to work on their Mac laptop and desktops. Large runs still go to Linux clusters, but small, debugging runs occur locally.

Per the parent, the lack of Fortran compiler causes an issue because some BLAS/LAPACK libraries align their symbols with whatever a Fortran compiler would do. As such, unless there's been a recent change, things like CMake need the compiler to determine the name for linear algebra routines.

I phrased the above as "sadly, yes" because supporting macos has been a pain and costs a fair amount of labor. In my case, Homebrew is required and there a bunch of specialized quirks in the build and packaging system that I'll contend are more difficult to deal with on macos than on Linux and Windows. Lastly, the requirement that macos be virtualized only on mac hardware complicates automating the build and test system since those processes must be relegated to a macos machine and I'd really rather not do primary development on a mac. Frankly, I'd pay Apple a not small amount of money to virtualize macos legally on non-mac hardware.

BLAS/LAPACK isn't that much of an issue, since Apple probably will need to ship their own implementation of this for Apple Silicon to get reasonable performance, and they can implement this in C, assembly, or whatever they want.

If they don't do that, then you can just use any "generic" C BLAS/LAPACK implementation, performance will be poor, but that's pretty much the only option if your hardware vendor doesn't support BLAS.

I guess people can write their own BLAS as well, but if you want to re-implement BLAS in 2020, then Fortran is probably not the best language to do that.

Apple's copy of LAPACK has not been keeping up with upstream and is missing some of the newer methods and bug fixes. Also while those are certainly the big two dependencies they are by far not the only ones.

I see the opposite from you: Mac laptops, crunching under Linux, very rarely see windows in the wild. I know windows sales are still robust so this is what I see but am not sure how far it can be extrapolated.

A huge chunk of scientific and numerical libraries rely on Fortran, for which 64-bit support is seriously lacking on Windows.

Doing this work is significantly easier out-of-the-box on Mac/Linux device.

Data Science is my main job and the first thing I did at my last job was ask if I could wipe windows and put Linux on the desktop they gave me.

> A huge chunk of scientific and numerical libraries rely on Fortran, for which 64-bit support is seriously lacking on Windows.

How so? mingw-64 exists, and so does Intel Fortran (with good integration with the VS IDE as well).

Intel and PGI Fortran work just fine on Windows, with VS integration as pointed by others already.

Lots of students have Mac notebooks, but want to run julia/scientific python/etc.

Yes. Most people in my lab have a MacBook (Pro) where we do most of our coding, and we ssh into a Linux cluster to run most of the compute. We have desktops but these are all Windows/Linux dual boots. We all practically need to use PowerPoint as well, so Mac is nice to have here since it can’t go on Linux laptops, and nobody wants to constantly reboot all the time.

Walking down the hallway in my physics department (pre-covid lockdown), I see almost all Macs. Some of them run windows, but most are apple hardware and software. Windows is quite rare when it comes to professors. It's more common among the grad students though, about tied with MacOS.