gramming practices you talk about are things … [that are] absolutely useless for one person wanting do a calculation more quickly. That’s all the computer models are, fancy calculators. I’ve seen plenty of Fortran and VB code to do modeling written by academics and it’s mostly awful but it also nearly always does the job.”

to Share or not

Efforts to encourage scientists to reveal
software code stem from philosophies
that began with the birth of comput-
ers. Because the big, clunky invention
was so expensive, software was freely
shared. “There wasn’t much that peo-
ple had written anyway,” says John
Locke, manager of Freelock Comput-
ing, an open-source business services
firm. “Sharing code was like sharing
scientific ideas, and was treated in the
same way.”
The U.S. Constitution provides pat-
ent and copyright protection to scien-
tists and their sponsors so they can
place their work in the public domain
while still being able to profit, Locke
argues. And this, he says, provides
enough protection to open up the code.

“Not sharing your code basically
adds an additional burden to others
who may try to review and validate your
work,” Locke says. “If the code is instru-
mental in testing a hypothesis, keeping
it closed can prevent adequate peer re-
view from taking place. After all, source
code is nothing more than a very spe-
cific set of steps to achieve a desired re-
sult. If those steps cannot be reviewed
in detail, the whole test is suspect.”
There is often hesitancy, however,
for these very reasons. Opening up the
code essentially throws “the books”
open. It further peels away the curtain
to reveal how the work was done. These
days, scientists are wary of providing
additional fodder that could impede
their work or damage their reputations.

“There are downsides [to revealing code],” says Alan T. DeKok, a former physicist who now serves as CTO of Mancala Networks, a computer security company. “You may look like a fool for publishing something that’s blatantly wrong. You may be unable to exploit new ‘secret’ knowledge and technology if you publish. You may have better-known people market your idea better than you can, and be cred-

“not sharing your
code basically adds
an additional burden
to others who may
try to review and
validate your work,”
says John Locke.

ited with the work. But in order to be
trusted, much of the work should be
released. If they can’t release key por-
tions, then the rest is suspect.”
While ethical considerations and
those conveyed in the greater interest
of science are often made to encourage
more information sharing, those same
considerations can be used to state
the case that some information needs
to remain undisclosed. Had the Man-
hattan Project happened today, for in-
stance, surely few people would call for
an open dissection of its software DNA,
says Mike Rozlog, developer tools prod-
uct manager at Embarcadero Technol-
ogies.

Also, science is a highly competitive endeavor, and funding is often based on a track record of success. “If you’re forced to release proprietary [code],” Rozlog says, “this could give a significant advantage to rogue organizations that don’t follow the same rules.”

opening up Science

For the past seven years, researchers
at Purdue University have attempted
to resolve this issue, especially with
the study of nanotechnology. Funded
by the National Science Foundation,
nanoHUB.org has been established
as a site where scientists and educa-
tors share simulation and modeling
tools and run their code on high-per-
formance computer resources, says
software architect Michael McLennan,
a senior research scientist at Purdue.
A toolkit called Rappture standard-
izes the input and output for the tools
and tracks details about execution,
such as which user ran which version
of the code, the computer used, and
the date of the usage. Simulations run
in a cloud of computing resources,
and the most demanding computa-
tions are sent to national grid comput-
ing resources such as the TeraGrid.
nanoHUB.org now has a core group of
110,000 users from more than 170 na-
tions, who launch more than 340,000
online simulations each year.

Further Reading

Feller, J., Fitzgerald, B., Hissam, S.A., and Lakhani, K.R. Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2005.

Ince, D.

If you’re going to do good science, release the computer code too. Manchester Guardian, Feb. 5, 2010. McLennan, M. and Kennell, R. hUBzero: a platform for dissemination and collaboration in computational science and engineering. Computing in Science and Engineering 12, 2, March/April 2010.

PurdueRCAC

hUBzero Cyberinfrastructure for Scientific Collaboration. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr0GA_ TluGY Dennis McCafferty is a washington, d.c.-based technology writer.