An inter-agency workshop sponsored by the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) / Software Design and Productivity (SDP) Coordinating Group (CG).

October 15th-16th 2015, Washington DC, USA
https://www.nitrd.gov/csessp

Extended Deadline: 26th June 2015 (any time of day)

Call for Participation

Software has emerged as a critical technology in all sectors including defense, health systems, banking, transportation, energy, science and engineering, and manufacturing. However, software lifecycle cost is increasingly becoming the dominant fraction of the total information technology investment. Additionally, software activities have been a major factor in large-scale project delays, failures, cost overruns, and productivity bottlenecks. There is a general consensus that current approaches produce software that is difficult to maintain, upgrade, and scale, especially in the face of rapidly changing machine architecture and new system requirements.

The CSESSP Challenges workshop will identify the unique issues around software productivity and sustainability faced by the NITRD computational science and engineering (CSE) communities, bringing together experts from academia, industry, government, and national laboratories. The workshop will focus on general issues and challenges of software systems sustainability and productivity with the aim of making software a first-class issue in the specification, design, cost and lifecycles management of science and engineering infrastructures. In this context, the workshop will discuss technical issues that impact software sustainability, such as software requirements engineering, high-productivity software engineering, reproducibility, software maintenance processes, and scalable, reusable, and portable software system architectures, to name a few.

We invite short (1 or 2 page) papers from computational science software developers, software system engineers, computer system engineers and architects, software managers, experts in related scientific software fields and government agency representatives. In the context of improving CSE software sustainability and productivity, these papers should identify and describe challenges, new approaches and strategies, best practices or experiences in related fields, and non-technical issues such as science policies and economic factors. These papers will be used by the program committee to structure the workshop, provide background material, and contribute to selecting attendees.

Areas of interest for the CSESSP Challenges Workshop include but are not limited to the following:

• Characterization of the emerging sustainability and productivity crisis from laptops to extreme-scale systems.
  • Software as a critical national infrastructure and as a virtual facility for computational science and engineering.
• New approaches to scientific software that significantly improve sustainability and productivity, including leveraging software engineering research:
  • Strategies and technologies for minimizing the impacts of rapidly changing architectures and languages on large software systems
  • Facilitating software performance, portability, legacy software factoring, interoperability and reusability.
• Understanding the economics of CSE software and opportunities and new models of partnership between academia, independent software vendors, the manufacturing industry and government:
  • Understanding licensing and governance issues.
  • Opportunities for economic sustainment of software tools.
• Encouraging and developing software ecosystems to support and advance sustained scientific innovation and discovery:
  • Supporting and leveraging changes in computing technologies, science methods and algorithms.
  • Understanding how software tools can contribute to sustainability & productivity.
• Supporting and encouraging CSE user and developer communities; education and building a CSE software workforce.

Submissions:

Submissions of up to two pages should be formatted to be easily readable and submitted as a PDF document using Easychair at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=csessp2015.

Deadline for Submission:

Extended to 26 June 2015 (any time of day)

Travel Support:

Some limited travel support may be available, please check the workshop web page.

Important Dates:

• June 26, 2015 – Paper submission deadline (extended)
• July 24 2015 – Workshop attendees invited
• September 11, 2015 – Deadline for acceptances
• October 15-16, 2015 – CSESSP Challenges Workshop

Organizers:

• Gabrielle Allen, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA
• Michael Heroux, Sandia National Laboratories

Steering Committee:

• Dai Hyun Kim, Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD)
• Daniel S. Katz, National Science Foundation
• James Kirby, Naval Research Laboratory
• Sol Greenspan, National Science Foundation
• Steven Drager, Air Force Research Laboratory
• T. Ndousse-Fetter, Office of Science, US Department of Energy
• Vivien Bonazzi, NIH/OD/Senior Advisor for Data Science Technologies ADDs Team
• Walid Keyrouz, National Institute of Standards and Technology

Program Committee:

• Jeff Carver, U of Alabama
• Tom Clune, NASA
• Merle Giles, U of Illinois
• Lois McInnes, Argonne
• Manish Parashar, Rutgers University
• Doug Post, DOD
• Roldan Pozo, NIST
• Ethan Coon, LANL

Reading Resources/References

List of workshop reading resources: publications, white papers, workshop reports, websites.

“Sustainable scientific software in Action!”

To be held with SciPy2015, July 10, 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm, AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center at the University of Texas, room 106, Austin, TX.

Agenda

Group discussions and lightning talks on community management and sustainability practices.  WSSSPE2.1 aims to end with concrete takeaways and “one sentence summaries” of participant experiences to fuel further scientific software sustainability.

To propose a lightning talk about sustainability of scientific software, email Matt Turk <matthewturk@gmail.com>

Organizers:

• Matthew Turk, University of Illinois
• Daniel S. Katz, University of Chicago & Argonne National Laboratory

First Call for Participation:
3rd Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE3)

September 28-29, 2015, Boulder, CO
http://wssspe.researchcomputing.org.uk/wssspe3/
(Co-located with 10th Gateway Community Environments (GCE15) Workshop)

Progress in scientific research is dependent on the quality and accessibility of software at all levels and it is now critical to address many new challenges related to the development, deployment, and maintenance of reusable software. In addition, it is essential that scientists, researchers, and students are able to learn and adopt a new set of software-related skills and methodologies. Established researchers are already acquiring some of these skills, and in particular a specialized class of software developers is emerging in academic environments who are an integral and embedded part of successful research teams. WSSSPE provides a forum for discussing these challenges, including presenting both positions and experiences, as well as a forum for the community to assemble and act.

The WSSSPE1 workshop (http://wssspe.researchcomputing.org.uk/wssspe1) engaged the broad scientific community to identify challenges and best practices in areas relevant to sustainable scientific software.  WSSSPE2  (http://wssspe.researchcomputing.org.uk/wssspe2) invited the community to propose and discuss specific mechanisms to move towards an imagined future practice of software development and usage in science and engineering.

WSSSPE3 will organize self-directed teams that will collaborate prior to and during the workshop to create vision documents, proposals, papers, and action plans that will help the scientific software community produce software that is more sustainable, including developing sustainable career paths for community members. These teams are intended to lead into working groups that will be active after the workshop, if appropriate, working collaboratively to achieve their goals, and seeking funding to do so if needed.

The main aim for this first call for participation is to collect additional ideas for teams to work on at WSSSPE3 (via email; see below.)

Initial ideas for these team activities, based on the breakout groups in WSSSPE2, are:

• Development and Community
  • Writing a white paper/review paper about best practices in developing sustainable software
  • Documenting successful models for funding specialist expertise in software collaborations
  • Creating and curating catalogs for software tools that aid sustainability (perhaps categorized by domain, programming languages, architectures, and/or functions, e.g., for code testing, documentation)
  • Documenting case studies for academia/industry interaction
• Training
  • Writing a white paper on training for developing sustainable software, and coordinating multiple ongoing training-oriented projects
  • Developing curriculum for software sustainability, and ideas about where such curriculum would be presented, such as a summer training institute
• Credit
  • Hacking the credit and citation ecosystem (making it work, or work better, for software)
  • Developing a taxonomy of contributorship/guidelines for including software contributions in tenure review
  • Documenting case studies of receiving credit for software contributions
  • Developing a system of awards and recognitions to encourage sustainable software
• Publishing
  • Developing a categorization of journals that publish software papers (building on existing work), and case studies of alternative publishing mechanisms that have been shown to improve software discoverability/reuse e.g., popular blogs/websites
  • Determining what journals that publish software paper should provide to their reviewers (e.g., guidelines, mechanisms, metadata standards, etc.)
• Reproducibility and testing
  • Building a toolkit that could allow conference organizers to easily add a reproducibility track
  • Documenting best practices for code testing and code review

Additional community suggestions are welcomed and encouraged!! (via email; see below)

Workshop Format:

• Opening keynote TBA
• Lightning talks – submissions welcome (via EasyChair, see below)
• Team sessions – initial list of possible sessions above; submissions of additional ideas welcome (via email, see below)
• Team progress report-back to plenary group
• At the end of the workshop, teams will “pitch” their ideas to the audience, possibly including some funders (who would not committed to funding anything, just providing feedback), including e.g., Moore, Sloan, Digital Science, NSF, NIH.

Call for Participation / Actions:

1. Save the dates for WSSSPE3: 28-29 September, 2015, Boulder, CO
2. Suggest additional team actions – Please propose your ideas by email (with subject WSSSPE3) to d.katz@ieee.org by 8 July, 2015
3. Submit lightning talks – submit a 1-page PDF containing the talk title, author names, affiliations, and a short abstract via Easychair, http://bit.ly/wsssep3-submit, by 3 August, 2015
4. Join the WSSSPE mailing list to be sure to get further information on WSSSPE3 – via http://bit.ly/wssspe-list

Travel Support:

Some limited travel support is likely to be available; please check the workshop web page.

Important Dates:

• Deadline for suggestions for new team activities: 8 July 2015 (any time of day, no extensions)
• Initial list of team activities to be posted on WSSSPE3 web page: 22 July 2015
• Lightning talk submissions: 3 August 2015 (any time of day, no extensions)
• Workshop: 28-29 September 2015
• Post-workshop report writing (participation is open to all): 30 September 2015

Organizers:

• Daniel S. Katz, d.katz@ieee.org, University of Chicago & Argonne National Laboratory, USA
• Gabrielle Allen, gdallen@illinois.edu, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA
• Sou-Cheng (Terrya) Choi, sctchoi@uchicago.edu,  NORC at the University of Chicago and Illinois Institute of Technology, USA
• Neil Chue Hong, N.ChueHong@software.ac.uk, Software Sustainability Institute, University of Edinburgh, UK
• Sandra Gesing, sandra.gesing@nd.edu, University of Notre Dame, USA
• Lorraine J. Hwang, ljhwang@ucdavis.edu, University of California, Davis, USA
• Manish Parashar, parashar@rutgers.edu, Rutgers University, USA
• Erin Robinson, erinrobinson@esipfed.org, Foundation for Earth Science, USA (local organizer)
• Matthew Turk, matthewturk@gmail.com, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA
• Colin C. Venters, colin.venters@googlemail.com, University of Huddersfield, UK