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Abstract: Programming is part of the curriculum of students of computer science, and it will be complemented with other related subjects to make them knowledgeable on the subject. The situation of a science or engineering student is the opposite; typically they have one course to learn one language, and that language is usually not the one they will first face in real-life situations. This situation has occurred for decades, and it is likely not going to change, but there is a real need to better prepare science and engineering students to face the very steep learning curve of having to start programming as part of an ongoing project or their thesis.
Universities like ours offer excellent facilities like the HPCs supplied by IT Services, yet the reality is that many students and young researchers may have never used a Unix based system, let alone a parallel system.
The book I wrote, “first steps in scientific programmings” aims at facilitating the passage through the learning curve by providing tips based on years of experience and my interaction with students and brilliant young researchers who did not have the opportunity to learn anywhere else the challenges which programming in a scientific environment involve.
I will briefly describe the points which I think are more important to emphasise, points which I’ve confirmed as important by interacting with other experienced researchers at the U. of Sheffield, who are trying to provide support for the people starting in this field.
Link for the book: https://sites.google.com/view/fsscientificprogramming/home
A supportive link: https://sites.google.com/a/sheffield.ac.uk/rcg/my-blog/research-computing-notes/firststepsinscientificprogramming
Bio: Patricio Ortiz holds a PhD. in astronomy from the University of Toronto, Canada. He has a keen interest in programming as a mean to create tools to help his research when no tools were available. He has taught at the graduate and undergraduate levels in subjects about astronomy, instrumentation, and applied programming. Throughout his career, Patricio has interacted with students at any level as well as post-graduates, helping him identify the most critical subjects needed by young scientists in the physical sciences and usually not covered by current literature. He has worked on projects involving automated super-nova detection systems; detection of fast moving solar system bodies, including Near-Earth objects and he was involved in the Gaia project (European Space Agency) for nearly ten years. Patricio also developed an ontology system used since its conception by the astronomical community to identify equivalent quantities. He also worked on an Earth Observation project, which gave him the opportunity to work extensively with high-performance computers, leading to his development of an automated task submission system which significantly decreases the execution time of data reduction of extended missions.
Patricio now works as a Research Software Engineer at the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield. He uses C, Fortran, Python, Java and Perl as his main toolkits, and as a pragmatic person, he uses the language which suits a problem best. Amongst his interests are: scientific data visualisation as a discovery tool, photography and (human) languages.
For queries relating to collaborating with the RSE team on projects: rse@sheffield.ac.uk
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