2008/8/28 Peter St. John <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > I think a physicist programming is like an astronomer grinding lenses (maybe > nobody does that anymore).
There is an even more direct analogy which I find useful -- experimental physicists. (Or chemists, or. what have you). To do cutting-edge stuff you need to build some of your own stuff -- if what you wanted to do could be done entirely with off-the-shelf equipment,it'd probably already be done. So you have to build your own equipment, meaning that there has to be people who know the science and people who know equipment-building techniques. In a huge collaboration (like big particle physics experiments) you really do have the money to have people ranging from pure builders and pure theoretical scientists with relatively small overlap of knowledge. But in the vast majority of cases, that doesn't happen, and you have to build teams of people who each know some degree of both. It's important not to lose track of the fact that it is (or should be) the science driving these `numerical labs'. So yes, when the dollars are scarce it is more important to have people who know the science than know how to code well; at least then then you can actually solve the science problem. But then you end up solving it inefficiently or in a way that makes it needlessly difficult to generalize to solving the *next* science problem. Much more progress, and faster, is made if the researchers know how to do both well, or at least have people to turn to whose knowledge complements theirs. Experimenters have had a good century or two head start to figure out how to train experimental scientists; it shouldn't surprise us that we're still figuring out what the right combination of people and skills is to staff computational science `labs'. But we'll get there. (And hopefully sooner than later. If experimental science were done with the same approach that computational science is done in my field, we would still think that light sailed through an aether...) Jonathan -- Jonathan Dursi [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
