Open Source Software For Experimental Physics?

jmizrahi writes "I've recently started working in experimental physics. Quite a few programs are used in the lab for assorted purposes — Labview, Igor, Inventor, Eagle, to name just a few. They are all proprietary. This seems to be standard practice, which surprised me. Does anybody know of any open source software intended for scientific research? Does anybody work in a lab that makes an effort to use open source software?"

Comments

Re:Your Reqs Are Too Specific, Try R or Octave

[Hatta]

I'm surprised you're surprised that you only find proprietary software in the highly specialized realm of "experimental physics." I mean, you have to be like a PhD in physics with a good deal of programming knowledge to make something accurate & useful (and there's probably gotta be like 50 failed projects before you get a good successful one).

To me, that makes it all the more important that ones work is distributed as widely as possible so that others may build upon it.

Labview

[Brit_in_the_USA]

I find labview very very good for experimental work. There are educational licenses and site licenses, and with the compiler you can distribute your programs for free.

At the end of the day I could always justify the expense of the software when the equipment it is controlling is orders of magnitude more expensive and some of the automation I was able to roll out saved weeks if not months of time.

The is also a great community of labview users who freely share (source) code they have developed - many under specific open source licenses.

At the end of the day I wouldn't get to hung up about open source when you are dealing with equipment and budgets where the software is 1% of the cost - just use the best tool to meet the requirement or risk project overrun and funding issues.

Re:Labview

[JustinOpinion]

At the end of the day I could always justify the expense of the software when the equipment it is controlling is orders of magnitude more expensive and some of the automation I was able to roll out saved weeks if not months of time.

Depends very much on the application. I once had a LabVIEW system that was getting camera input. I needed to do some simple image processing (and I mean really simple), but the only way I could do that in LabVIEW was to buy a gigantic add-on package that was very expensive. So in the end I coded it myself, but what should have been a 5-minute coding exercise (just modify one of the LabVIEW VIs to export some data) ended up being quite a bit more complicated because LabVIEW is closed-source (so I couldn't just go into a VI and make the simple change I needed).

This is just one example where LabVIEW's closed-source nature slowed me down. On the other hand, the community is quite good and there are many useful VIs being freely offered on the forums.

At the end of the day I wouldn't get to hung up about open source when you are dealing with equipment and budgets where the software is 1% of the cost - just use the best tool to meet the requirement or risk project overrun and funding issues.

Open-source isn't just about money. The ability to modify the code can frequently be very helpful, especially when you're trying to do something non-traditional (which seems like all the time in experimental physics!). In science there is also the issue of "knowing what's going on" inside the software if you're ever going to trust the data that comes out of it. And we shouldn't ignore the educational benefit (and all-around fun) of being able to get into code and modify it. Science is about learning (in particular for students; but tinkering is also crucial for established scientists!).

Re:Your Reqs Are Too Specific, Try R or Octave

[gmueckl]

Well, the average scientific experiment really is buggy, feature-incomplete and crash-prone. And this doesn't even include the software for controlling them. All that *really* matters is getting solid data.

Maybe it's Alzheimer's but...

[Bentronathon]

Does anyone remember that category where you could submit questions to /. and then get responses from the community? I wonder what happened to that...