KDE Conquers Astrophysics With Kst

Telex4 writes "The Free Software community is constantly inundated with interesting new projects, but occasionally something crops up which is really special. Kst is just such a project. Started by Barth Netterfield, an astrophysicist, as a personal project to plot data from his experiments, it has now taken on a life of its own, being used in numerous academic projects, and finding funding from several government agencies. Intrigued by this project's success, and with a little prod from co-developer George Staikos, I interviewed Barth and George about kst, Free Software and physics."

KDE Naming

I suppose its slightly better than KastroPhysics.

Pychart

That definitely looks cool - another nice way I've found to plot data in a Python/QT environment is with Pychart [hp.com]

It's easy to generate png/pdf/ps plots and they look really nice.

Re:Pychart

If you like Python for doing plotting check out vpython [vpython.org] Its basically a very simple opengl interface glued into python. Its actually originally designed to as a "computational physics" pedagogy language (which its really pretty fantastic for actually) but since its really just python its very easy to turn it into a poor mans 3d/4d plotting program :)

Re:Pychart

Hell, why stop there? VTK [vtk.org] and MayaVi [sf.net] are also pretty amazing visualization kits, both of which are either written in or provide python bindings. (MayaVi is built on VTK, but it provides a nice wrapper.) VTK has great isosurface locaters and some pretty awesome vector algorithms for looking at 2d and 3d data. We use it for physical applications at my work...

"kst"?

For the record, I had nothing to do with this.

Shouldn't that be "Konquered"?

As in "konquered astrophysiks"? How else can I tell that it was written for KDE?

Lets not let this go to our heads

The author used Linux/KDE because that is what he was familiar with when he developed it. Its not suprising since universities are very UNIX centric. But that doesn't necessarily mean KDE is better suited for this type of application. In my opinion, no operating system/window manager will really have any significant advantages since the bulk of the work is number crunching. It could of easily been done in Win32.

Not quite...

I take your point - most of this application, like many, is in principle doable independant of the underlying OS.

However, there are a few pluses on the side of Linux for this application.

2 GB+ files. Some versions of Win32 can do them, some can't. Some can only do it with a following wind. When you're talking scientific data, such file sizes can crop up often, if not a regular feature.

Network independance. This is less of an issue for display, but on the processing side, being able to coordinate multiple tasks, spread across many servers, from one desktop is a big win. Particualrly when it's a 'free' side effect (requires no extra programming). Four boxes are cheaper than a quad box - by quite a sizeable margin.

Which leads us on to the scheduler - with Win2K, a background number crunch task will take longer than on Linux, and impact interactive response more. That's not off the top of my head - that's based off my Linux/KDE desktop and my office mates Win2K systems doing the same tasks (computational chemistry, so essentially big matrix sums).

There's also library support. Not such a big one, as they can be ported, but it's more work that way. By libraries, I mean things like FFTW, LAPACK and BLAS.

So, that's a few areas with modest wins for unix/KDE. I'll add that headless admin for Unix is simpler than for Windows, which helps with the headless cruncher boxes, and conclude that there is a reason that unix is popular in universities, as it's got a slight edge.

Yes, it may well have been as easy to write for Win32 as KDE [0] - but in use, the linux is better for the number crunching.

[0] I wouldn't agree to that personally, but there's a degree of personal preference in there, so that's not objective.

Re:Lets not let this go to our heads

Unix systems have had a historical advantage in scientific computation. Netterfield mentioned that he had first used XForms, looked at gtk+, felt queasy and decided to use KDE instead.
As Kst is primarily a plotter of data, his choice of graphics toolkit is of some importance.

I'm sure many will ask this...

Why didn't the article headline read, "KDE Konquers Astrophysicists with Kst?"

On a more serious note: This question wouldn't arise if KDE people didn't insist on prefixing EVERYTHING with "K." Of course, same goes for GNOME folks prefixing everything with "G." Why is this necessary?

Re:I'm sure many will ask this...

Why is this necessary?

It's gnecessary kuz it's kool.

Re:I'm sure many will ask this...

This has all been gone over before, but it isn't new to kde/gnome.

X*, win* go back farther probably.

I think it's both a style thing (recognizable 'gAIM, on that must be AIM for gnome'), and also it makes it easy to tell what works with what. xemacs clearly is the X version of emacs. winamp clearly doesn't work on linux or mac, and konquerer clearly doesn't work on gnome.

Re:I'm sure many will ask this...

So we know easily what WM libraries a package requires without looking at the depends.

Personally I don't like it when packages don't prepend their names with k or g if they are specifically for KDE or Gnome. It's annoying when you try to install it and it says it wants to install gnome libraries, or KDE libraries (whichever WM libraries you don't like installing, maybe both if you're limited on HD space)

It's consistent, and it works. It may seem a bit lame sometimes, but it makes things really easy for me (And others).

Also from an ease of use standpoint, it makes it easy to know what to expect from a package. "Oh, that has a k before it, that means I'll be seeing KDE themes on that app if I'm running XFce."

Sure, we should probably have a unified theme so things are pretty seamless and you can't tell if something is for KDE or Gnome (or more specifically, using qt or gtk). But we're not there yet, and it would be really confusing if we didn't keep things the way they are.

I think eventually a distro will successfully make it possible for all apps to look similar to each other in all WM, and I think it would be a good thing to do that.

kst

It looks good, but I'm skeptical about its usefulness for me. ROOT [root.cern.ch] already produces damn good output and fills most of my needs. And for everything else there's gnuplot. [gnuplot.info]

But I will look at kst. If it's as good as they say it is, I may use it instead of gnuplot.

Another one?

We need to stop creating all of these astrophysics programs for Linux and develop the ones we have now!

He'll need it...

... to plot how quickly his site gets slashdotted. ;)

I would have thought Gnome

I thought they were looking to find the Grand Gnunified Theory.

An interesting take on the GPL

It's interesting to see some airtime finally given to attitudes that academics have towards the GPL. In my time, I've often found that smaller research groups are more than willing to open-source their code once they're made aware that the GPL exists (you'd be surprised how many mid-career academics are unaware of its existence).

On the flipside, I've seen many instances of arguments between research students and faculty about open-sourcing code. This is especially prevalent in areas like nanotech research, condensed matter, and opto/spin-electronics research groups. It seems to be a worrying trend that many students who are just beginning their postgrad studies are forced to sign NDAs before being allowed to code for their research group. Sometimes I think myself lucky that all I need is chalk and a blackboard...

Openness in academia

People share their ideas and publish, because if they don't they don't get tenure or graduate or whatever. But there's often a big development investment involved in going from some paper published in a journal to working code. The published paper may give you the major differences between what they've done and the previous work, but most any important achievement builds on a bunch of prior work which is, say, contained in 5 other papers, which in turn were each based on 5 other papers each, and tracking all that down and getting it and translated into code can take a long time.

So say I'm the guy who published the paper -- while you're spending all your time re-implementing my previous method, I've already gone on and developed another few enhancements or a whole new method, and gotten another paper or two out of it, while you're still trying to recreate what I did last year.

So basically, just because the ideas in academia are basically open, that doesn't mean the implementations are. In fact, I've heard some math guys voice the opinion that releasing your source code is just a waste. It takes a significant time investment on your part to get it all packaged up, perhaps cleaning up the code some, and then to answer questions people have about it etc. And when it comes time for tenure review, they don't ask you how much source code you released. No, all that matters is how many journals you published in. So while you were busy cleaning up your source code for release, fixing non-critical bugs and adding non-essential features, you could have been working on the next publication instead.

Of course a lot of researchers do go all the way with openness and release source. But I've seen plenty of both strategies.

Another part of the equation is that Universities these days all want a piece of the action on anything invented within their walls. So they want you file for patents and such, and try to find people that will license those patents. And naturally a big cut of the licensing fees go to the Universtity. And then there's folks who dream of starting their own multi-million dollar spin-off technology company, so they don't want to let too many details about what they're doing to leak out until they've got all the patents lined up.

Instructions

Anyone else not able to read the instructions because its MIME type is text/html?

Python Announces Fork...

Pst (pronounced pissed...or post, depending on who you ask) is a Python fork of the now-popular kst program. Instead of astrophysics, it endeavors to plot a graph of aggression among IT employees.

Finding absolutely no funding from anyone, including government agencies, the project has taken a life of its own among overworked volunteer developers. These Pst programmers work dilligently on the code while concurrently providing enough test data to plot.

Due to its popularity, a port using Microsoft Foundation Classes is in the works. Rumor has it that it will be called MFT (pronounced miffed). A C port is also being made -- and their sourceforge project is located at ifuckinhateusers.sourceforge.net

Ever since Igor

I used <a href="https://www.wavemetrics.com">Igor</a&g t; as an undergrad for most of my data plotting and graphing (physics), but the interface was not intuitive and without knowing the command-line language, navigating the menus took a very long time, even when you knew what you were looking for. Also, the price ($400 for the latest version) kept me away from using it off campus. Now I tend to stick to <a href="http://root.cern.ch/">ROOT</a> simply because its Cint interpreter is ideal for handling the massive (10^6 n-tuples) amount of data I look over, and because it's free. However, making advanced graphs and plots with ROOT requires a whomping manual and a fairly good grasp of C, as there are virtually no point-and-click features to it. I'm really glad another open-source data manipulation program is in the works, and that it can do the things ROOT can as easliy as Igor can without the emense price restrictions.

Grace (aka Ace/gr)

Why reinvent the wheel, what was wrong with using Grace [weizmann.ac.il].

While I agree that the Motif app looks a little outdated, the app is free as in GPL and is really powerful in terms of features. For example, it allows scripting.

Ob Simpsons Reference

"There is so much i dont know about astro physics; I wish I read that book by that wheel chair guy."

But is this easy enough for Homer to use? ;)

Submission stolen from kdenews.org

While I'm sure the guys over at kdenews are happy this made it to the front page of slashdot, I'm sure they would have appreciated a little credit...

Where the name comes from

From the tutorial [utoronto.ca]:

Q: What does kst stand for?

A: The 'k' in kst stands for the same thing as the K in KDE. (ie, the letter after J and before L). The 's' and the 't' have a similar explanation.

Gretl

Another piece of software that became quite a hit in academia is Gretl, the GNU Econometrics, Time-series and regression library.

It's a perfect clone of eViews, and it's free as in "just grab it"

OK, fine...

Now KDE has an astophysics program. Can it do colour-magnitude diagrams? Can it give real-time feedback from particle accelerators?

You open source people have to cover this or Microsoft will walk all over you.

(Satire, probably bad, noted here to CMA.)

What does he do with it?

Yawn, same old third for license issues, third for introduction... Leaves just a couple sentences to what would be most interesting to a geek: what is he doing with it.

gondola pointing sensor time traces, and bolometer detector, sound more like something that a fiction author made up to this not an astro physicist, but reasonably smart. I'd be much more interested in his research and how the program works than all the boring details around the program and who uses it.

There can be only one....

GNUPLOT [gnuplot.info]. All others suck. I especially love the functional fitter.

Gnuplot?

Can anyone comment on this compared with Gnuplot?

LaTeX and Gnuplot got me through college without having to pay for laser printing papers (the laser printers on the unix machines were free, but the ones on the PCs and Macs were a nickel a page.).

R project

R project (www.r-project.org) can do many (if not all) of what Kst is doing. And R is available fo ryears - meaning it's stable and mature.

crazy name crazy guy

"Started by Barth Netterfield, an astrophysicist,"

is it just me, but when i first scanned that my brain said

"Started by Battlefield Earth..."

So, if it was with Gnome, it would be:

Gastrophysics !!!

(bleh, what else to do that write silly comments on Slashdot on a boring day like this...)

Starlink

An extensive range of astronomy software is available through the UK's Starlink project [rl.ac.uk]

Lots of pieces, but no free Mathematica equivalent

While it's great to see that there are all sorts of free tools and software libraries that handle various types scientific computation, visualization and analysis, it is disappointing that there doesn't seem to be a 'free', integrated tool that can compete with Mathematica [wolfram.com].

While Wolfram and his team have done some truely amazing things and produced a product that is worthy of the $1880 price tag, I am astonished that the mathematic and scientific communities have not pooled their resrouces to produce something like it (please tell me I'm wrong about this... if there's something better than Mathematica I'd love to know, especially if it can do symbolic tensor calculus).

There seem to be lots of computer science and mathematics researchers who churn out papers on computational methods for various 'hard' calculations, analysis, symbolic manipulation and visualization. C libraries, produced by their graduate students, for doing these things seem to be abundant.

As mentioned by other posters there are plenty of free graphing, plotting and analysis packages that can deal with specific areas of interest, but there doesn't seem to be a general purpose, extendable, package that can do all of that stuff the way that Mathematica can. I'm sure that Universities all over the world have enough demand for Mathematica licenses from their mathematics and physics professors alone to justify some colaborative effort to create an open tool that can do the same. In addition, a co-ordinated effort like that would provide a platform for those grad students to extend rather than just toss out another computation or analysis library that will gather dust.

Re:screenshot?

RTFA!

kst1.png [tomchance.org.uk]
kst2.png [tomchance.org.uk]

Re:Funding

You may be trolling, but that is an interesting question - there are definitely arguments for releasing it as BSD licensed. I don't agree at all with the moderators for modding the comment as Flamebait.

Here's one reason to make it GPL - it makes financial sense. Since they have invested money and time into this project, they should strive to maximize their potential return.

By making it GPL, their initial investment can be improved upon by anyone, and the Kst project can reap the benifits.

Re:Funding

You mean like your tax-funded congress, your tax-funded police department, or your tax-funded internal revenue service?

Re:NO! It can't be!

would have been funny, but you mixed up your nerd categorization. Clearly a Star Wars geek.

Re:Funding

How about because they chose Qt as the toolkit because it makes development easier, and Qt is GPL licensed, so derivatives have to be?
Dumbass.