How do scientists really use computers?
There’s a nice short article in American Scientist titled How do scientists really use computers?
An interesting read if you, as I, teach life scientists (and not computer scientists) computer science.
The conclusion doesn’t surprise me much, though:
Our results can be interpreted in many ways, but I think two things are clear. The first is that if funding agencies, vendors and computer science researchers really want to help working scientists do more science, they should invest more in conventional small-scale computing. Big-budget supercomputing projects and e-science grids are more likely to capture magazine covers, but improvements to mundane desktop applications, and to the ways scientists use them, will have more real impact.
Even at BiRC where we do a lot of genome analysis that really do need computer grids, most of our computer use is desktop computers.
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August 8th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
Maybe it’s because I’m a genomicist who is getting into metagenomics, but I really have to wonder how desktop computers are of much use these days for biology other than for writing papers and browsing the web. The trend is for larger and larger studies, and I don’t see that changing what with next generation sequencing techniques producing more and more sequence data for less and less money. Do we need better interfaces for accessing compute grids? Of course. But the days where a a biologist using sequence data could run a couple of programs on their desktop computer and get publishable results are over as far as I can see.
August 8th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
The way we use computers is to have a few heavy duty number crunching analyses run on grids that gives us a lot of summary statistics of the data we are analysing, and then we do a lot of interactive analysis of those summaries.
So yes, we really do need the grid computing to do the initial analysis, but by far the most time we spend is spend at the desktop computer looking at the summaries of the data, trying to get some biological understanding out of the number crunching results.
August 10th, 2009 at 5:23 am
[...] simple. We are talking about teaching biologists how to program, but perhaps in an analogy to what Thomas Mailund talks about, we should perhaps be teaching computational scientists better software engineering. I know how [...]
August 10th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
My primary reaction to the article is that it is absurdly biased.
I know dozens of biologists in traditional academic departments and medical schools and only one or two of them even comes close to spending 30 percent of their time developing scientific software – most of them clock in at zero percent of their time.
The sample for this article seems quite clearly to be “scientists who do a lot of software development”, not “scientists” in general.
August 10th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
rr: True. I’m not sure exactly how the respondents were selected, but I get the impression that it was just a web-survey that people could choose to fill in or not, and in that case I am not surprised to see a biased result…