In:
Solar Physics, Springer Science and Business Media LLC, Vol. 295, No. 4 ( 2020-04)
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 $99\pm 0.5$ 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). $63\pm 4$ 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 $73\pm 4$ 73 ± 4 % of respondents cite scientific software in their research, although only $42\pm 3$ 42 ± 3 % do so routinely.
Type of Medium:
Online Resource
ISSN:
0038-0938
,
1573-093X
DOI:
10.1007/s11207-020-01622-2
Language:
English
Publisher:
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Publication Date:
2020
detail.hit.zdb_id:
2211848-2
detail.hit.zdb_id:
1473830-2
SSG:
16,12
