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Unix - Putting Scientists in Control

© Adam Hughes

In our search for the "perfect" operating system for scientific computing purposes, we've been able to determine a couple of criteria for evaluation purposes : ease of use and flexibility of use. The first stop on our tour of operating systems was a survey of Windows. As detailed in last week's article, Windows is great at providing accessible and easy-to-use tools, but it makes it nearly impossible for the scientist to get "inside" and tune things exactly as he wants them. To gain this kind of control, the researcher usually turns to the Unix operating system.

To the average computer user, booting up Unix on a machine probably wouldn't seem like a profound experience. Usually, there is a blank screen with a few "buttons", and that's it. It doesn't look too impressive, and if you don't have some experience with Unix, it's a good bet that you'd have no idea what to do to run a program or even type your name. So, right up front, Unix gets low marks for accessibility to the user.

However, once you pull up the Unix shell, which is the command line prompt in Unix, the fun can begin. Obviously, you're not going to be pointing and clicking your way through your computer sessions, but you can become very adept at using some powerful Unix tools in a fairly short period of time. For instance, one of the more powerful file editors is emacs. With emacs, you can draw several files into buffers at once, set up macros from your keyboard to perform large-scale editing functions, and similarly control every aspect of the file you're interested in. This type of functionality permeates the whole of the Unix operating system and leaves the scientist in the driver's seat.

Of course, this probably sounds like a lot of work, and it probably also conjurs visions of our beloved researchers writing their own code for any and all applications. While this can certainly be done if one has a masochistic streak, there are scores of very useful programs available for free which perform any number of important functions. What's more, these applications can be used as black boxes, wherein the researcher just feeds in his input, waits for some calculations to be done, and collects his rewards on the other end. However, he can also configure even the available packages to his needs, customizing as he goes along.

Unix is certainly no panacea when it comes to solving computing problems in the scientific world, but with a little effort, it can exponentially increase a researcher's capacity to perform

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