Bobra, MG;
Mumford, SJ;
Hewett, RJ;
Christe, SD;
Reardon, K;
Savage, S;
Ireland, J;
... Perez-Suarez, D; + view all
(2020)
A Survey of Computational Tools in Solar Physics.
Solar Physics
, 295
(4)
, Article 57. 10.1007/s11207-020-01622-2.
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Abstract
The SunPy Project developed a 13-question survey to understand the software and hardware usage of the solar-physics community. Of the solar-physics community, 364 members across 35 countries responded to our survey. We found that 99±0.5% of respondents use software in their research and 66% use the Python scientific-software stack. Students are twice as likely as faculty, staff scientists, and researchers to use Python rather than Interactive Data Language (IDL). In this respect, the astrophysics and solar-physics communities differ widely: 78% of solar-physics faculty, staff scientists, and researchers in our sample uses IDL, compared with 44% of astrophysics faculty and scientists sampled by Momcheva and Tollerud (2015). 63±4% of respondents have not taken any computer-science courses at an undergraduate or graduate level. We also found that most respondents use consumer hardware to run software for solar-physics research. Although 82% of respondents work with data from space-based or ground-based missions, some of which (e.g. the Solar Dynamics Observatory and Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope) produce terabytes of data a day, 14% use a regional or national cluster, 5% use a commercial cloud provider, and 29% use exclusively a laptop or desktop. Finally, we found that 73±4% of respondents cite scientific software in their research, although only 42±3% do so routinely.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | A Survey of Computational Tools in Solar Physics |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1007/s11207-020-01622-2 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11207-020-01622-2 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| UCL classification: | UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10103855 |
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