Also amused by the speed up factor required…. Even old Fortran compilers produced efficient code even on modern computers and the latest version of Fortran is 2008, so the only way of getting the speed up is to improve the algorithms. Not so much a job for a code monkey as a mathematician or run the code on new hardware. Fortran is available on both PC and Linux platforms, so unless they need something to run on a super computer they are whistling in the wind.