Testing of HPC Scientific Software

Monday 14 November 2016, 1:30pm-5:00pm, Room 255-D

[SC16 program page] [Promotional video]

Description: Testing at various granularities has recently acquired an urgency in high-performance scientific computing communities because of the need for refactoring caused by changing platform architectures. Projects that need to refactor are often lacking in the necessary expertise and resources to acquire such expertise. Testing is also critical for producing credible results and for code maintenance. The IDEAS (www.ideas-productivity.org) scientific software productivity project aims toward increasing software productivity and sustainability with participants from many projects that define the state of practice in software engineering in the HPC community. We offer a tutorial that distills the combined knowledge of IDEAS team members in the area of scientific software testing. The tutorial will be useful to all projects that recognize the importance of testing in general and will provide tremendous help to projects in need of refactoring their software in particular.

Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics 2016-2017 webinar series

Software Practices in Computational Science Communities – an Overview

Thursday 13 October 2016, 2:00pm-3:00pm PT

[webinar web page]

Anshu Dubey, Argonne National Laboratory

Scientific code developers typically adopt software processes derived from the mainstream (non-scientific) community when continuing without them becomes impractical. However, many software best practices need modification and/or customization, partly because the codes are used for research and exploration, and partly because of the combined funding and sociological challenges. This webinar will describe the lifecycle of scientific software and important ways in which it differs from other software development.  We will provide a compilation of software engineering best practices that have generally been found to be useful by science communities, and how they are evolving as the needs of their communities grow.