News
- Events for the CSE Software community at Supercomputing 2016 in Salt Lake City, including a workshop, a tutorial, and a birds-of-a-feather session! [More info] Organizing an event? Let us know
Who are we?
The Computational Science & Engineering (CSE) Software Forum is an international group of researchers and other stakeholders from national laboratories, academic institutions, and industry who are interested in (and concerned about) development processes for software for computational science and engineering and related technical computing areas, with a particular interest in CSE on high-performance (parallel) computers.
What are we doing?
We’re creating a clearinghouse to gather, discuss, and disseminate experiences, techniques, tools, and other resources for the entire lifecycle of CSE software, from initial concept through the growth phase to maturity, re-investment, and eventually to retirement.
We want to raise awareness of the importance of good software practices to scientific productivity and to the quality and reliability of computationally-based scientific results, as well as raising awareness of the increasing challenges facing CSE software developers as high-end computing heads to extreme scales.
Many Forum members are active in outreach to the CSE community, not only raising awareness of the issues, but also providing practical guidance, training, and support to help software developers understand and address their particular software issues.
Why is it important?
The computational science and engineering community is facing a crisis in software productivity due a confluence of powerful factors, including ongoing disruptive changes in computer architectures, new frontiers in the modelling, simulation, and analysis of complex multiscale and multiphysics phenomena, and increasing expectations of predictive skill.
The result is software that is increasingly large and complex, developed by geographically distributed multidisciplinary teams, making it more challenging to develop and maintain the software at quality levels commensurate with the scientific needs.
The vast majority of CSE software developers have little or no formal education or training in software engineering. Further, know from experience that software engineering practices from other areas (IT, business, etc.) do not necessarily translate directly to the CSE domain. And while CSE software developers have accumulated a great deal of practical experience, the prevailing culture emphasizes the scientific results over the software tools used to obtain them. So the CSE community has a tendency not to share experiences with software.
The CSE Software Forum intends to change this by providing a forum to share our experience and learn from others.
How can I get involved?
If you’re interested in this topic, as a software developer or another kind of stakeholder; as someone with experience to share or someone wanting to learn more, please start by joining the cse-forum mailing list to join in discussions and see relevant announcements.
If you prefer to receive only the announcements of relevant events and formation of new working groups, join the cse-announce mailing list (announcements will also be sent to the cse-forum list, so you do not need to subscribe to both).
Working Groups
We will form working groups to discuss various software development topics, gathering and discussing experiences and distilling them into best practices, how-tos, and other documents which will be available to the community. Working groups will have their own section on this site and their own mailing lists. Join working groups that interest you. New working groups may be suggested on the cse-forum mailing list.
CSE Software Bibliography and other Resources
While we realistically can’t hope to create a comprehensive bibliography of research in scientific literature on software engineering for CSE, we plan to set up a contributory bibliography of papers our members have found useful and relevant. (Coming soon)
Likewise, there are many other tools resources for CSE software development, which we would like to link to. (Coming soon)
Affiliated Projects, Programs, and Events
If you have a project, program or event that would be of interest to the CSE software community, we’d like to link to it. (Coming soon)