[HN Gopher] Crucial Computer Program for Particle Physics at Ris...
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Crucial Computer Program for Particle Physics at Risk of
Obsolescence
Author : theafh
Score : 54 points
Date : 2022-12-01 16:02 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| cratermoon wrote:
| Related discussion on programming and academia:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33671264
| moomin wrote:
| It's yet another story of the dumb misalign incentives in
| academia. Hand the guy a Nobel Prize. See if that moves the
| needle a bit.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _Universities tend to track scientists' publication records_
|
| Yet another example of administrators imposing a one-size-fits-
| all rule and elevating convenience over quality. Every academic I
| know hates how academia works, but they balk every time I suggest
| networking with people outside their disciplinary silos to
| dethrone the administrators. It's like the smartest people in the
| world are stymied by the idea of a collective action problem that
| requires working across disciplinary boundaries. For a long time
| I thought I was missing something fundamental about the
| complexity of the issue, but after 10 years of asking it seems to
| literally be that individuals are afraid of getting punished and
| they don't have any ideas beyond supporting the occasional strike
| action (that will leave things more or less as they are). I don't
| get it.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| I mean you basically just described Autism. "Wow, you guys are
| amazing at your Special Interest and talking with other people
| with the same Special Interest. Why aren't you interested at
| talking with these Neurotypical bean counters about finance
| stuff?" Not that I'm saying every physics major is Autistic. I
| myself know several in my graduating class who are not.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I resemble that remark myself. I would only clarify that I
| think the time for talking with bean counters is long past.
| machina_ex_deus wrote:
| It's pretty remarkable that despite Feynman Diagrams being
| invented in the 1950s, before computers and computer science,
| they are still state of the art so many years later. It was back
| at the time where physicists did most calculations by hand.
|
| You'd have thought something more efficient would've turned out
| by now, since there was barely a sensible definition of
| efficiency back then.
| zokier wrote:
| > Without ongoing development, FORM will get less and less usable
| -- only able to interact with older computer code, and not
| aligned with how today's students learn to program. Experienced
| users will stick with it, but younger researchers will adopt
| alternative computer algebra programs like Mathematica that are
| more user-friendly but orders of magnitude slower. In practice,
| many of these physicists will decide that certain problems are
| off-limits -- too difficult to handle. So particle physics will
| stall, with only a few people able to work on the hardest
| calculations.
|
| This seems very pessimistic view. FORM was written by mortal
| humans (with much cruder tools!) in the first place, there is no
| reason to believe it couldn't be done again if need be and even
| improved in the process; its not some irreplaceable artifact
| descended from heavens.
|
| On the other hand, I imagine it would take bit more than just
| maintenance to make the 30 year old C codebase welcoming for new
| physicists to work on.
| naasking wrote:
| > FORM was written by mortal humans (with much cruder tools!)
| in the first place, there is no reason to believe it couldn't
| be done again if need be and even improved in the process
|
| Sure, but how long will that take and how robust will the
| result be? Given the description of the design, it basically
| sounds like it does efficient block-level storage management in
| order to handle the petabytes of data that it might need to
| churn through, so basically you're reimplementing a DB storage
| engine, which is no small feat to get right and performant.
|
| Furthermore, is there a test suite to validate that the FORM2.0
| yields the same results for all past papers?
|
| These problems are not unsolvable but they're not trivial
| either.
| akiselev wrote:
| The hard part isn't writing the code but making sure it's valid
| against all the data in (for example) the PDG Review of
| Particle Physics book.
|
| A bug in the code would throw doubt on every paper published
| with it so the expected value for any individual rewriting it
| or making any modifications is extremely negative for their
| career.
| xeonmc wrote:
| I wouldn't be so sure about the march of progress being
| monotonously towards improvement.
|
| Take Electron,
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > Take Electron,
|
| I'd rather not, thanks. Unless you meant in the sense of
| "take it out back and shoot it", in which case we're bloody
| trying already, it's not that easy.
| robacarp wrote:
| I'm not at all worried that particle physics will slow down
| (...heh) because of this. It sounds like the one guy has been
| doing an incredible job of service maintenance over the years,
| sure, but these folks write software all the time.
|
| I have a hunch that FORM is not made up of easy to grok
| software designs or it would probably be true that other folks
| would have contributed in a bigger way regardless of academic
| stimuli. If that is indeed the case, as is common in research-
| academia software product, then tie a bow on it and send it off
| to the Smithsonian.
|
| I would be really quite surprised if some enterprising 19 year
| old whiz-bang genius from Iceland didn't re-write it in
| Mathematica.
| robacarp wrote:
| having now poked at the source code on github, yeah this is
| not at all maintainable by modern standards. it's the kind of
| code you're unable to modify until you memorize every last
| line and the whole problem domain.
| Qem wrote:
| > I would be really quite surprised if some enterprising 19
| year old whiz-bang genius from Iceland didn't re-write it in
| Mathematica.
|
| Still would be a net loss for science, as a critical piece of
| software infrastructure would become tied to Wolfram's
| proprietary black box. Also I think academic software
| benefits less often from a random precocious outsider fixing
| things, because in addition to good programming knowledge, it
| requires a fair amount of subject matter expertise, what is
| rare to be found both in the same person.
| avmich wrote:
| > The problem scales as a factorial, a mathematical relationship
| that grows even faster than exponential growth.
|
| Hm. I thought Stirling's approximation shows they are
| approximately of same growth?
| prof-dr-ir wrote:
| https://github.com/vermaseren/form
| simne wrote:
| This is looking strange, because Particle Physics is one of very
| few areas, where hardware is not magnitudes cheaper than
| software.
|
| I mean not only computer hardware, which is also non cheap, but
| budgets for experimental hardware, which not all countries can
| handle.
|
| So, if program is really important, they could rearrange budgets
| and give some finances for software.
| selimnairb wrote:
| Agreed. I would be shocked if an entity like CERN would not be
| able to support something like FORM out of grant overhead.
| Qem wrote:
| The root cause is academia still didn't adjust the rewards to
| take into account the computer age. People only get career points
| by publishing papers, not source code. Software is a fundamental
| aspect of most current research. We need to recognize researchers
| that dedicate to write/maintain the required software, awarding
| the fair amount of career points. Make good software
| documentation be the equivalent to papers for them, career-wise.
| It surely would improve the state of academic software. Today
| students still commonly have to struggle with software stuck in
| the 70s, usability-wise.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| It would also greatly increase the diffusion into industry of
| techniques. I often read papers that describe an interesting
| approach to something I am interested in doing. But often the
| paper requires me to read many references and spend dozens of
| hours or more to reach an implementation myself. I simply can't
| invest that time on something that might work.
|
| But if the code were available... then you could quickly test
| out if something is worth pursuing.
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