Joe Landman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I see a curious phenomenon going on in crash simulation and NVH. We > see an increasing "decoupling" if you will, between the detailed > issues of simulation and coding, and the end user using the simulation > system. That is, the users may know the engineering side, but don't > seem to grasp the finer aspects of the simulation ... what to take as > reasonably accurate, and what to grasp might not be. > > I don't see this in chemistry, in large part due to many of the users > also writing their own software.
On the contrary. I know computational chemistry specialists who worry about users of the common commercial software (Gaussian, Jaguar, etc.) not knowing what to believe and what not to believe in the output. Since I've seen people in synthetic organic labs running the simulation software to design possible synthetic pathways without understanding the software, I think this worry is perfectly valid. The overwhelming majority of users are not computational chemists at all -- they're ordinary organic chemists, and they don't have a good gut feel for what the limitations of the tools are. I know of very few users of computational chemistry software who roll their own. Try reading the computational chemistry mailing lists for a little while, or reading the journals, and you'll get a feel for what the average user is like. There might be a lot of people writing software out there, but there are vastly more who just want to get answers and don't understand how the programs work at all. Perry -- Perry E. Metzger [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
