A Survey of Computational Tools in Solar Physics

The SunPy project is happy to announce the results of the solar physics community survey!

For six months last year, between February and July 2019, the SunPy Project asked members of the solar physics community to fill out a 13-question survey about computational software and hardware. A total of 364 community members, across 35 countries, took our survey.

We found that 99±0.5% of respondents use software in their research and 66% use the Python scientific software stack. Students are twice as likely as faculty, staff scientists, and researchers to use Python. In this respect, the astrophysics and solar physics communities differ widely: 78% of solar physics faculty, staff scientists, and researchers in our sample uses IDL, compared with 44% of astrophysics faculty and scientists sampled by Momcheva and Tollerud (2015).

We also found that most respondents (63±4%) have not taken any computer science courses at an undergraduate or graduate level. We found that a small fraction of respondents use the commercial cloud (5%) or a regional or national cluster (14%) for their research. Finally, we found that 73±4% of respondents cite scientific software in their research, although only 42±3% do so routinely.

Our survey results are published in the journal Solar Physics and available via open access at the following URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-020-01622-2.