Title :
A survey of the practice of computational science
Author :
Prabhu, Prakash ; Jablin, Thomas B. ; Raman, Arun ; Zhang, Yun ; Huang, Jialu ; Kim, Hanjun ; Johnson, Nick P. ; Liu, Feng ; Ghosh, Soumyadeep ; Beard, Stephen ; Oh, Taewook ; Zoufaly, Matthew ; Walker, David ; August, David I.
Author_Institution :
Princeton Univ., Princeton, NJ, USA
Abstract :
Computing plays an indispensable role in scientific research. Presently, researchers in science have different problems, needs, and beliefs about computation than professional programmers. In order to accelerate the progress of science, computer scientists must understand these problems, needs, and beliefs. To this end, this paper presents a survey of scientists from diverse disciplines, practicing computational science at a doctoral-granting university with very high re search activity. The survey covers many things, among them, prevalent programming practices within this scientific community, the importance of computational power in different fields, use of tools to enhance performance and soft ware productivity, computational resources leveraged, and prevalence of parallel computation. The results reveal several patterns that suggest interesting avenues to bridge the gap between scientific researchers and programming tools developers.
Keywords :
natural sciences computing; parallel processing; programming; computational power; computational resources; computational science; computer scientists; parallel computation; programming practices; programming tools; scientific community; scientific research; software productivity; Educational institutions; MATLAB; Programming; Scientific computing; Testing; Writing;
Conference_Titel :
High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC), 2011 International Conference for
Conference_Location :
Seatle, WA
Electronic_ISBN :
978-1-4503-0771-0