The Software behind the Higgs Boson Discovery
In this column, David Rousseau describes the enormous software development effort associated with teasing out evidence for the elusive Higgs boson, a cornerstone of the Standard Model. In keeping with previous Impact columns, everything about this is huge but the application is unique.
Creating the Virtual Universe
Simulation software is important to our understanding of the universe. The intrinsic multiphysics aspects are spiced with a range of temporal scales and spatial scales, both of which cover more digits than are available in the standard hardware. This, together with the intrinsic chaotic nature of many physical processes, poses quite a challenge. To meet this challenge, researchers developed the Astronomical Multipurpose Environment (AMUSE). Instead of writing a suite of multiphysics solvers from scratch, AMUSE's developers coupled existing solvers for each physical ingredient. The result is a highly inhomogeneous collection of dedicated solvers with a homogeneous protocol that scales to supercomputers.
Software Mileage
Looking back on the first seven Impact columns for IEEE Software, the editors propose a new metric called software mileage, defined as the number of new customers per year per line of code.