IF-free conception.

[razzle]

in fact, true HPC was destroyed by GHz in CPUs. who cares about optimization, if new "stone" will give more GHz muscle??? some years ago, many "experts" dreamed of 10 Ghz "stone". But such way got run out & now needs more sophisticated techniques to accelerate. 2nd moment, the rest of software for HPC has been pouring from COTS w/ some kind of "tuning".

Sure, performance no longer comes from an ever increasing clock rate but from an increasing number of cores. And that puts concurrent programming at the centre stage.

But the solution is not a holy grail or a fifth element (as the proposal you referred to suggests). The solution is much more mundate than that, namely skilled programmers.

If the navy has money to spare they should put it into Ada, a "magic tool" style project the military already started. Most of the existing navy software should in Ada already, at least if they live by their own rules. Any advances should be made public and freely available for the benefit of everyone.

The Second Coming of Ada would be a much better project, and I think the language is worth it.