Recently, I watched a fellow particle physicist talk about a calculation he had pushed to a new height of precision. His tool? A 1980s-era computer program called FORM
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Developed by the Dutch particle physicist Jos Vermaseren, FORM is a key part of the infrastructure of particle physics, necessary for the hardest calculations. However, as with surprisingly many essential pieces of digital infrastructure, FORM’s maintenance rests largely on one person: Vermaseren himself. And at 73, Vermaseren has begun to step back from FORM development. Due to the incentive structure of academia, which prizes published papers, not software tools, no successor has emerged
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Since 2000, a particle physics paper that cites FORM has been published every few days, on average. “Most of the [high-precision] results that our group obtained in the past 20 years were heavily based on FORM code,” said Thomas Gehrmann, a professor at the University of Zurich.
Some of FORM’s popularity came from specialized algorithms that were built up over the years, such as a trick for quickly multiplying certain pieces of a Feynman diagram, and a procedure for rearranging equations to have as few multiplications and additions as possible. But FORM’s oldest and most powerful advantage is how it handles memory.
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FORM bypasses swapping and uses its own technique. When you work with an equation in FORM, the program assigns each term a fixed amount of space on the hard disk. This technique lets the software more easily keep track of where the pieces of an equation are. It also makes it easy to bring those pieces back to main memory when they are needed without accessing the rest.
Memory has grown since FORM’s early days, from 128 kilobytes of RAM in the Atari 130XE in 1985 to 128 gigabytes of RAM in my souped-up desktop — a millionfold improvement. But the tricks Vermaseren developed remain crucial. As particle physicists pore through petabytes of data from the Large Hadron Collider to search for evidence of new particles, their need for precision, and thus the length of their equations, grows longer.
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As crucial as software like FORM is for physics, the effort to develop it is often undervalued. Vermaseren was lucky in that he had a permanent position at the National Institute for Subatomic Physics in the Netherlands, and a boss who appreciated the project. But such luck is hard to come by. Stefano Laporta, an Italian physicist who developed a crucial simplification algorithm for the field, has spent most of his career without funding for students or equipment. Universities tend to track scientists’ publication records, which means those who work on critical infrastructure are often passed over for hiring or tenure.
“I have seen over the years, consistently, that people who spend a lot of time on computers don’t get a tenure job in physics,” said Vermaseren.
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Without ongoing development, FORM will get less and less usable — only able to interact with older computer code, and not aligned with how today’s students learn to program. Experienced users will stick with it, but younger researchers will adopt alternative computer algebra programs like Mathematica that are more user-friendly but orders of magnitude slower. In practice, many of these physicists will decide that certain problems are off-limits — too difficult to handle. So particle physics will stall, with only a few people able to work on the hardest calculations.
In April, Vermaseren is holding a summit of FORM users to plan for the future. They will discuss how to keep FORM alive: how to maintain and extend it, and how to show a new generation of students just how much it can do. With luck, hard work and funding, they may preserve one of the most powerful tools in physics.
Source: Crucial Computer Program for Particle Physics at Risk of Obsolescence | Quanta Magazine
Robin Edgar
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