from the story-NOT-brought-to-you-by-Steve-Ballmer dept.
This once secretive scientific field is embracing openness in a big way:
The words "nuclear physics" tend to conjure images of heavily guarded laboratories or trench-coated spies whispering to each other on park benches and exchanging briefcases full of file folders stamped "Classified: Top Secret." But despite this reputation for secrecy, today's nuclear scientists embrace openness. And it's paying off.
[...] Many nuclear science organizations have released open source software in recent years, which is a big change from business as usual in the field. Though CERN, which focuses on fundamental particle physics rather than energy generation, is the birthplace of the web and has long embraced open source, other institutions have historically been less open. "There's a history of secrecy in the field. Most fusion and fission software used to be proprietary," says Paul Romano, the project lead for OpenMC and a computational scientist working in nuclear fusion at Argonne National Laboratory. "But as open source has exploded over the past decade, it plays an increasingly important role in research, both in the public and private sectors."
Despite open source's many benefits, it took time for the nuclear science field to adopt the open source ethos. Using open source tools was one thing—Python's vast ecosystem of mathematical and scientific computing tools is widely used for data analysis in the field—but releasing open source code was quite another.
[...] Many of these projects that started with nuclear science in mind are applicable to just about any field that benefits from using supercomputers. MFEM, for example, is also used in LLNL's cardiac simulation toolkit Cardioid, its crystal plasticity application ExaConstit, and its thermomechanical simulation code Serac. It is also heavily used by the broader scientific community, including industry and academia, in applications such as MRI research at Harvard Medical School, and quantum computing hardware simulation at Amazon. MOOSE is widely used outside of the nuclear field, with applications in areas such as groundwater modeling and other geoscience use cases. During the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, researchers at LLNL used Merlin to anticipate outbreaks and Maestro for antibody modeling.
Open source also paves the way for anyone, regardless of their scientific background, to pitch in and help push science forward. Many of these projects can benefit from experienced software engineers, as software engineering isn't always a strength for scientific researchers. "The scientific community is trying to learn best software development practices, but there's a lot to learn from professional developers," says MIT's Peterson. "There are lots of opportunities for experienced developers to help build CI/CD pipelines, write unit tests, and generally help create higher-quality codebases."
Contributing to a project's upstream dependencies is another way to help out, LLNL's Peterson says. Merlin, for example, relies heavily on the Python-based distributed task queue Celery. And, like practically all open source projects, these need help with documentation and bug reports. "We can never get enough documentation, and not all of it needs to be written by specialists," Gaston says.
Opening repositories to specialists and non-specialists alike for collaboration is a far cry from the cloak-and-dagger image that the nuclear physics field cultivated over the decades. But it's a big part of what pushes science forward as creators gain valuable contributions from outside their own organizations. "We have hundreds of contributors at this point," says Permann, the manager of the MOOSE project. "It's not just the National Labs and universities either. Private companies are a little more cautious about what they contribute to open source, but they help out as well and there's a mutual benefit."
It also encourages the teams to write better code in the first place. "We treat every pull request like it's a submission to an academic journal," Kolev says. "When you know your code is going to be scrutinized by other people, it sets a higher bar."
Though secrecy still has its place, it takes openness to keep moving forward.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Thursday April 13 2023, @12:15PM
Note that there is a legal barrier to do with sharing things that can be used to make weapons. CERN for example has a couple of closed source codes for this reason...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by SomeRandomGeek on Thursday April 13 2023, @03:16PM
Most universities require computer science majors to take 2-3 semesters of calculus and 2-3 semesters of physical sciences. As a working software developer who has taken all these courses, I can say that they have been of absolutely no value in my professional life. But I bet the existence of all these calculus/physics educated computer scientists makes it easier for actual physicists to find computer scientists who are willing/able to collaborate with them.