Celebrating 70 years of Fortran

  • Joe Wallwork
  • Last Updated: September 2026

Celebrating 70 years of Fortran

Fortran has been supporting scientific software engineering and critical infrastructure for 70 years. To celebrate this, the Institute of Computing for Climate Science (ICCS) will be holding a 'birthday party' on 1 December 2026 at the Science and Industry Museum, in Manchester, UK. The timing was chosen to align with Computing Insights UK (CIUK) - 'the UK's premier conference for HPC and associated research' - which will be held a short walk away between 2-4 December 2026.

Outline

The birthday party event will have three parts:

  • 10:00-13:00 - Small community meetings.
  • 14:30-18:15 - Main workshop in the museum conference suite.
  • 18:15-20:00 - Drinks reception in the exhibition hall, including a demonstration of the Baby computer and poster presentations.

Workshop programme

The main workshop will be held from 14:30-18:15 in the museum conference suite. It will take the form of a retrospective, with three sections: past, present, and future. The sections are expanded upon below and are also available as a Fortran program!

Past: Keynote address

The main workshop will begin with a keynote address by Damian Rouson from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Damian's talk will act as a retrospective of the past 70 years, covering successes and challenges and motivating attendees to see how far we've come.

Damian Rouson

Present: Lightning talks

The 'Present' section will begin with cutting birthday cakes to be served during a refreshment break!

There will also be a number of short talks, including sponsor talks on the Fortran work they support, lightning talks on exciting developments underway right now, and lightning talks on community initiatives that are making waves. You can submit lightning talk proposals in the registration form. Ideally, we would like to hear from early- and mid-career members of the community.

Future: Break-out discussion

The main workshop will culminate in an extended break-out discussion on the next 70 years and what direction we as a community would like the Fortran language and its community to go in. We would like to hear from everyone, from all career stages and from across academia, government, industry, vendors, and funders. There will be an opportunity to share any suggestions you have for discussion topics when completing the registration form.

Sponsors

This event could not have been possible without the generous support of our sponsors. We are delighted to announce that the following organisations have agreed to sponsor the event.

Platinum sponsors: AMD and Dell Technologies.

AMD logo
Dell logo

Bronze sponsors: CAKE, OpenMP, and ICCS.

CAKE logo OpenMP logo ICCS logo

Registration

Attendance will be free of charge, thanks to the support of our funders and sponsors.

To register, complete the following form: https://forms.gle/NjXfManJWmwLX7sc7.

Whilst it will be a primarily in-person event, there will also be an option to join remotely via Zoom.

Registration will close on 9th November 2026.

More information

If you have any questions about the event programme, please contact lead organiser Joe Wallwork at jw2423[AT]cam.ac.uk. For administrative and organisational queries, please contact the ICCS Operations Team at iccs[AT]maths.cam.ac.uk.