[Numpy-discussion] Comment published in Nature Astronomy about The ecological impact of computing with Python

[Sebastian Berg]

On Tue, 2020-11-24 at 18:41 +0100, Jerome Kieffer wrote:
> Hi Pierre,
> 
> I agree with your point of view: the author wants to demonstrate C++
> and Fortran are better than Python... and environmentally speaking he
> has some evidences.
> 
> We develop with Python, Cython, Numpy, and OpenCL and what annoys me
> most is the compilation time needed for the development of those
> statically typed ahead of time extensions (C++, C, Fortran).
> 
> Clearly the author wants to get his article viral and in a sense he
> managed :). But he did not mention Julia / Numba and other JIT
> compiled
> languages (including matlab ?) that are probably outperforming the
> C++ / Fortran when considering the development time and test-time.
> Beside this the OpenMP parallelism (implicitly advertized) is far
> from
> scaling well on multi-socket systems and other programming paradigms
> are needed to extract the best performances from spercomputers.
> 

As an interesting aside: Algorithms may have actually improved *more*
than computational speed when it comes to performance [1].  That shows
the impressive scale and complexity of efficient code.

So, I could possibly argue that the most important thing may well be
accessibility of algorithms. And I think that is what a large chunk of
Scientific Python packages are all about.

Whether or not that has an impact on the environment...

Cheers,

Sebastian


[1] This was the first resource I found, I am sure there are plenty:
https://www.lanl.gov/conferences/salishan/salishan2004/womble.pdf


> Cheers,
> 
> Jerome 
> 
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