Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 13:07:54 -1000 (HST) From: "Hubert T. Yamada" <yamada@ifa.hawaii.edu> To: j mckitrick <jcm@FreeBSD-uk.eu.org> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Who writes the esoteric scientific Unix apps? Message-ID: <20011217124941.K32804-100000@shark.ifa.hawaii.edu> In-Reply-To: <20011214170714.A13736@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org>
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On Fri, 14 Dec 2001, j mckitrick wrote: > We hear so often that high-end Unix worstations are used for advanced > scientific applications. The biggest of the big iron usually goes to > weather/finance forecasting and especially nuclear research. > > Who writes these apps? Specialized software companies or in-house > developers? Are they batch-based, command line apps or GUI driven? In astronomy, most of the data reduction / analysis tools are written by the astronomers and grad students. The support work is sometimes given to software people (including electrical engineers). Generally, the further an application is from publishable results, the more likely it is that some form of software specialist will do it. Data reduction packages tend to be command line driven. These are usually used for the lighter work. The heavier work tends to be automated or semi-automated. GUI's are not rare, but they are not really common. Often, software development is done using a data reduction package like IDL/PvWave (commercial) or IRAF (developed at NOAO and distributed for free). These packages generally let the user develop extensions in C and FORTRAN. Data reduction is generally pretty simple, and generally consists of a few simple steps that have to be carried out on a large amount of data. This makes it easy to automate a lot of it, though most data reduction requires a certain amount of human intervention. It's easy to automate most of the process, but the borderline situations take a lot more effort. Hubert -- Hubert Yamada, University of Hawaii, Institute for Astronomy phone: (808)956-6648 e-mail: yamada@galileo.ifa.hawaii.edu OR yamada@hawaii.edu WWW: http://ccd.ifa.hawaii.edu/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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