4 ms·
A disclaimer -- I do not work in physics, however a couple of recent physics Ph.D. that I work with expressed similar views. Speed is not nearly as important n
by ptero 9y ago
A disclaimer -- I do not work in physics, however a couple of recent physics Ph.D. that I work with expressed similar views.
Speed is not nearly as important now as it was 10-15 years ago. A typical scientist's worstation has 20 CPU cores. If I want to use 100 CPUs for a few days, it is trivial and 1000 is easy to get. Thus the fact that Python is slow(er) does not bother me unless I am setting up something major.
What matters though, is the availability of libraries that let me reliably run my experiments. If there is a bug, it must be in my code, not the library -- a "discovery" caused by a software bug is humiliating. This is where Fortran shines and Python is not quite there yet -- the decades of beating on those libraries made them very well understood and trusted.
- DannyBee 9y ago"Speed is not nearly as important now as it was 10-15 years ago." Please try telling that to other users sometime. They do not seem to agree.
- ptero 9y agoWhat users? I do work in research and this is what I see almost every time -- doubling the number of CPUs available for a simulation is trivial; getting someone to rewrite existing code to make it twice as fast on the same CPU is hard. I am not talking about interactive programs -- a slow browser is annoying. I am talking about scientific computing. This is just my experience, can you provide some counterexamples?
- lostboys67 9y agoSo more cores means you can simulate to a higher resolution