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KDE Conquers Astrophysics With Kst
Telex4 writes "The Free Software community is constantly inundated with interesting new projects, but occasionally something crops up which is really special. Kst is just such a project. Started by Barth Netterfield, an astrophysicist, as a personal project to plot data from his experiments, it has now taken on a life of its own, being used in numerous academic projects, and finding funding from several government agencies. Intrigued by this project's success, and with a little prod from co-developer George Staikos, I interviewed Barth and George about kst, Free Software and physics."
I suppose its slightly better than KastroPhysics.
It's easy to generate png/pdf/ps plots and they look really nice.
Why is this necessary?
It's gnecessary kuz it's kool.
bash: rtfm: command not found
It looks good, but I'm skeptical about its usefulness for me. ROOT already produces damn good output and fills most of my needs. And for everything else there's gnuplot.
But I will look at kst. If it's as good as they say it is, I may use it instead of gnuplot.
We need to stop creating all of these astrophysics programs for Linux and develop the ones we have now!
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I take your point - most of this application, like many, is in principle doable independant of the underlying OS.
However, there are a few pluses on the side of Linux for this application.
2 GB+ files. Some versions of Win32 can do them, some can't. Some can only do it with a following wind. When you're talking scientific data, such file sizes can crop up often, if not a regular feature.
Network independance. This is less of an issue for display, but on the processing side, being able to coordinate multiple tasks, spread across many servers, from one desktop is a big win. Particualrly when it's a 'free' side effect (requires no extra programming). Four boxes are cheaper than a quad box - by quite a sizeable margin.
Which leads us on to the scheduler - with Win2K, a background number crunch task will take longer than on Linux, and impact interactive response more. That's not off the top of my head - that's based off my Linux/KDE desktop and my office mates Win2K systems doing the same tasks (computational chemistry, so essentially big matrix sums).
There's also library support. Not such a big one, as they can be ported, but it's more work that way. By libraries, I mean things like FFTW, LAPACK and BLAS.
So, that's a few areas with modest wins for unix/KDE. I'll add that headless admin for Unix is simpler than for Windows, which helps with the headless cruncher boxes, and conclude that there is a reason that unix is popular in universities, as it's got a slight edge.
Yes, it may well have been as easy to write for Win32 as KDE [0] - but in use, the linux is better for the number crunching.
[0] I wouldn't agree to that personally, but there's a degree of personal preference in there, so that's not objective.