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Comment by akubera | Hacker News Reader

As a QGP scientist, it's nice to see the work coming out of heavy ion theory & accelerator experiments (those at RHIC and LHC) cross-pollinate to other areas such as astrophysics/astronomy. In particular, they use the prediction that nucleons are expected to "melt" into free-quarks around a temperature of 145MeV (1.6 trillion Kelvin) as a parameter for the evolution of the supernova. This number will get better with the results of the beam-energy-scan at RHIC (Brookhaven National Lab).

Their model software has a cool name, too: AGILE-BOLTZTRAN (probably a large Boltzmann equation in Fortran?). I haven't been able to find the sources for it after a quick search. It's too bad, because the world could use some more supernova-simulation-as-a-service services.

Anyways, hope they detect their multi-neutrino bursts!

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> It's too bad, because the world could use some more supernova-simulation-as-a-service services.

Can you elaborate on this? I figure you're probably joking but in case you're not...

I guessed it was a joke, and I found it funny :)

The "as-a-service" was meant to be funny, but I have found that it is often difficult to find special-purpose scientific software (with adequate build system) mentioned in papers online, without sneakernet/emailing the authors directly. Hosting analysis-runners on the web would make doing a test much easier. (It's getting better; the ALICE collaboration (of which I'm a member) for instance uses github for the analysis code and dependencies https://www.github.com/alisw, but each scientist doesn't need to upload their fitting & plotting code.)

Writing a REST API in front of their software would help with "service-discovery", usability, and of course reproducibility; but there's the issue of sending back many-GB of data per run, questionable amount of customization (but if you allow uploading an ini config file, that should be ok), no institutional history of doing tasks this way, and the fact that this is not what I'm paid to do.

For more on scientific computation differs from a more typical setup, I highly recommend this StrangeLoop talk by Jim Privars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvt4v2LTGK0

Oh, I'm curious not because I necessarily want such a product.

I'm curious because designing, building, and delivering such a thing has been a "back of my head, maybe when i retire, for fun" project. Also, in my career I've done software consulting for physicists, mathematicians, biologists, and I always find it superbly rewarding,

I'm a systems software engineer, with HPC experience, some devops as well, and a penchant for numerical science oriented code.

Somewhere in my past I wanted to be a computational physicist, or cosmologist, or really anything that deals with the fundamentals of the universe but also requires lots of high performance code and big iron :)

Then I realized I was a far better software engineer than an academic. I asked for a followup because if there actually is a use for stuff like this, it's not too far from what I consider my dream project.

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