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 andaddress 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.
Contact
- Michael A. Heroux, Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM
- Duong H. Do, Saint John's university, Collegeville, MN
- Subscribe our Google group for more information.