A Survey of Computational Tools in Solar Physics

The SunPy Project developed a 13-question survey to understand the software and hardware usage of the solar-physics community. Of the solar-physics community, 364 members across 35 countries responded to our survey. We found that 99 ± 0.5 $99\pm 0.5$ % 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 rather than Interactive Data Language (IDL). 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 ). 63 ± 4 $63\pm 4$ % of respondents have not taken any computer-science courses at an undergraduate or graduate level. We also found that most respondents use consumer hardware to run software for solar-physics research. Although 82% of respondents work with data from space-based or ground-based missions, some of which ( e.g. the Solar Dynamics Observatory and Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope ) produce terabytes of data a day, 14% use a regional or national cluster, 5% use a commercial cloud provider, and 29% use exclusively a laptop or desktop. Finally, we found that 73 ± 4 $73\pm 4$ % of respondents cite scientific software in their research, although only 42 ± 3 $42\pm 3$ % do so routinely.