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

[morgan_greywolf]

Agreed. I've know people who work in experimental physics labs. Some of them code. And the use of open source software is quite a bit more than one might think. Check out this guy's blog. He regularly hacks together interesting scripts in Python, for instance.

Geist3D

[dedazo]

I know of this one, if only because it's written in Python and I ran into it looking for some unrelated 3D tools. It does do physics simulations, AFAIK.

He means I think experimental control

[goombah99]

The programs he names:
labview, igor, matlab, are not simply data analysis tools but also have hardware control modules. You can run your data acquisition from Igor, and matlab and of course Lab view.

things like R or octave or scipy dont' have control and acquisition modules that I know of.

That said, it seems to me that since scipy is in python that any python DAQ system would fit the bill of a scientific software system.

So the real question is, what DAQ's are available for python.

and the answer is going to be, that daq softwares tend to get written to drive specific hardware systems. e.g. labview makes a whole suite of DAQ boards. there's oscilloscopes and so forth.

As a scientist you don't want to get bogged down building a custom daq. SO the real bottom line is what commercial DAQs are open in design.

The only system I know that might possibly be in the open is the OASIS daq's developed for flow cytometry. these are mass produced and were developed at the National Labs. But I don't know how it is lic.

of course, one can always use an oscilloscope or DAQ made to be controlled by GPIB or simmilar common language. In that case it's pretty easy to write your own as long as you can find a suitable open source GPIB output driver.

f2py

[goombah99]

Python has mad fortran all the mor valuable. the combination of fortran and python is a match made in heaven.

fortran is a wonderfully good algorithmic language but it is terrible at everything else. python is great at everything else, but slow as a dog.

one of fortrans strengths when combined with python is oddly enough it's simplicity and lack of sophistication. unlike c++ It compiles so fast that you can feasibly have python write fortran on the fly optimized for the algorithm and compile it, all during run time.

Fortran is good for non-computer scientist in part because it is quite hard for a typo to be a logic error. (e.g. = instead of ==) as a result it's comparatively easy to debug compared to C.

but it can't do all the fun memory management tricks, introspection, or objects that advanced languages do.

But with f2py you can push all of that into python and then just have it call short simple fortran routines for speed.