I don’t know what people think scientists are doing, but we are not just spreadsheet number crunching. In my PhD I was analyzing petabytes of structured data f

I don’t know what people think scientists are doing, but we are not just spreadsheet number crunching. In my PhD I was analyzing petabytes of structured data from particle detectors that required relatively complex algorithms just to reconstruct, before any physics analysis is ever started, and the analyses were just as complex. My experiment’s total code base was at least 100kloc of C++ and Fortran if not more, and used a farm with over 20k cores for massive distributed processing, single jobs regularly taking hundreds or thousands of cores and terabytes of memory. I’m currently working on distributed GPU accelerated hydrodynamic simulations where a single input is in the ~1-10Gb range of structured mesh data and the calculation requires ~200+ Gb of GPU memory. I really don’t see how excel would be a viable option for basically anything I have worked on in my scientific career, beyond my undergraduate toy analyses.