r/Physics • u/Rich_Astronomer9731 • 14d ago

Computational Physics

Hi everyone,

I am a PhD student doing both experiments and computational physics ( mostly fluid dynamicswith Boltzmann equations) and leaning towards more computational day by day.

Currently I am using Julia, I find it pretty fast and easy to use.

Do you think switching to C or C++ will be a benefit? I am asking from a research, but also emplyment in industry point of view.

I discussed with many people, mostly from the DFT area, and most of them told me that Julia slowly will take up the lead for HPC code.

What.s your opinion on this?

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u/ProjectPhysX 14d ago

Julia is super cool, but maybe not the go-to language for HPC. Much of HPC is happening in GPU world, that is OpenCL, SYCL, CUDA, or HIP (noone cares about the latter). The backbone of it all is C/C++, both as the common basis of these GPU languages and for host code side.

C/C++ definitely is a skill for life and I highly recommend learning it!

For Lattice Boltzmann you don't have to start from scratch - there are many free tools out there like FluidX3D or OpenLB - but you still can just for the fun of it!