Abstract
The SunPy Project developed a 13-question survey to understand the software and hardware usage of the solar-physics community. Of the solar-physics community, 364 members across 35 countries responded to our survey. We found that 99pm 0.5% of respondents use software in their research and 66% use the Python scientific-software stack. Students are twice as likely as faculty, staff scientists, and researchers to use Python rather than Interactive Data Language (IDL). In this respect, the astrophysics and solar-physics communities differ widely: 78% of solar-physics faculty, staff scientists, and researchers in our sample uses IDL, compared with 44% of astrophysics faculty and scientists sampled by Momcheva and Tollerud (2015). 63pm 4% of respondents have not taken any computer-science courses at an undergraduate or graduate level. We also found that most respondents use consumer hardware to run software for solar-physics research. Although 82% of respondents work with data from space-based or ground-based missions, some of which (e.g. the Solar Dynamics Observatory and Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope) produce terabytes of data a day, 14% use a regional or national cluster, 5% use a commercial cloud provider, and 29% use exclusively a laptop or desktop. Finally, we found that 73pm 4% of respondents cite scientific software in their research, although only 42pm 3% do so routinely.
Highlights
The SunPy Project (The SunPy Community et al, 2020) facilitates and promotes the use and development of community-led, free, and open source1 data-analysis software for solar physics based on the scientific Python environment
The astrophysics and solar-physics communities differ widely: 78% of solar-physics faculty, staff scientists, and researchers in our sample uses Interactive Data Language (IDL), compared with 44% of astrophysics faculty and scientists sampled by Momcheva and Tollerud (2015). 63 ± 4% of respondents have not taken any computer-science courses at an undergraduate or graduate level
Our survey results show that Python is the most popular programming language only among students; IDL and Python are at parity for postdocs, and IDL is more popular than Python for faculty, staff scientists, researchers, software developers, and instrument developers
Summary
The SunPy Project (The SunPy Community et al, 2020) facilitates and promotes the use and development of community-led, free, and open source data-analysis software for solar physics based on the scientific Python environment. To better understand the software and hardware preferences of the solar-physics community, the Project developed a 13-question survey (reproduced in Appendix A) and disseminated it internationally over a six-month period between 7 February 2019 and 28 July 2019. Many of the survey questions were similar (and in some cases, identical) to those posed by Momcheva and Tollerud (2015) in an informal survey of 1142 members of the astrophysics community. This article presents the survey results, derived from analyzing 364 responses from community members across 35 countries. All of the survey responses, along with the code (Reback et al, 2020; Caswell et al, 2020; Waskom et al, 2020; van der Walt, Colbert, and Varoquaux, 2011; Bobra, Mumford, and Pereira, 2020) to analyze these data and produce the figures in this article, are publicly available at github.com/sunpy/survey
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