The Scalability-Efficiency/Maintainability-Portability Trade-off in Simulation Software Engineering: Examples and a Preliminary Systematic Literature Review

Large-scale simulations play a central role in science and the industry. Several challenges occur when building simulation software, because simulations require complex software developed in a dynamic construction process. That is why simulation software engineering (SSE) is emerging lately as a research focus. The dichotomous trade-off between scalability and efficiency (SE) on the one hand and maintainability and portability (MP) on the other hand is one of the core challenges. We report on the SE/MP trade-off in the context of an ongoing systematic literature review (SLR). After characterizing the issue of the SE/MP trade-off using two examples from our own research, we (1) review the 33 identified articles that assess the trade-off, (2) summarize the proposed solutions for the trade-off, and (3) discuss the findings for SSE and future work. Overall, we see evidence for the SE/MP trade-off and first solution approaches. However, a strong empirical foundation has yet to be established; general quantitative metrics and methods supporting software developers in addressing the trade-off have to be developed. We foresee considerable future work in SSE across scientific communities.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures. Accepted for presentation at the Fourth International Workshop on Software Engineering for High Performance Computing in Computational Science and Engineering (SEHPCCSE 2016

Mining Knowledge in Astrophysical Massive Data Sets

Modern scientific data mainly consist of huge datasets gathered by a very large number of techniques and stored in very diversified and often incompatible data repositories. More in general, in the e-science environment, it is considered as a critical and urgent requirement to integrate services across distributed, heterogeneous, dynamic "virtual organizations" formed by different resources within a single enterprise. In the last decade, Astronomy has become an immensely data rich field due to the evolution of detectors (plates to digital to mosaics), telescopes and space instruments. The Virtual Observatory approach consists into the federation under common standards of all astronomical archives available worldwide, as well as data analysis, data mining and data exploration applications. The main drive behind such effort being that once the infrastructure will be completed, it will allow a new type of multi-wavelength, multi-epoch science which can only be barely imagined. Data Mining, or Knowledge Discovery in Databases, while being the main methodology to extract the scientific information contained in such MDS (Massive Data Sets), poses crucial problems since it has to orchestrate complex problems posed by transparent access to different computing environments, scalability of algorithms, reusability of resources, etc. In the present paper we summarize the present status of the MDS in the Virtual Observatory and what is currently done and planned to bring advanced Data Mining methodologies in the case of the DAME (DAta Mining & Exploration) project.Comment: Pages 845-849 1rs International Conference on Frontiers in Diagnostics Technologie

Analysis of Computer Science Communities Based on DBLP

It is popular nowadays to bring techniques from bibliometrics and scientometrics into the world of digital libraries to analyze the collaboration patterns and explore mechanisms which underlie community development. In this paper we use the DBLP data to investigate the author's scientific career and provide an in-depth exploration of some of the computer science communities. We compare them in terms of productivity, population stability and collaboration trends.Besides we use these features to compare the sets of topranked conferences with their lower ranked counterparts.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, 6 table

Bioconductor: open software development for computational biology and bioinformatics.

The Bioconductor project is an initiative for the collaborative creation of extensible software for computational biology and bioinformatics. The goals of the project include: fostering collaborative development and widespread use of innovative software, reducing barriers to entry into interdisciplinary scientific research, and promoting the achievement of remote reproducibility of research results. We describe details of our aims and methods, identify current challenges, compare Bioconductor to other open bioinformatics projects, and provide working examples

Laboratory Test Bench for Research Network and Cloud Computing

At present moment, there is a great interest in development of information systems operating in cloud infrastructures. Generally, many of tasks remain unresolved such as tasks of optimization of large databases in a hybrid cloud infrastructure, quality of service (QoS) at different levels of cloud services, dynamic control of distribution of cloud resources in application systems and many others. Research and development of new solutions can be limited in case of using emulators or international commercial cloud services, due to the closed architecture and limited opportunities for experimentation. Article provides answers to questions on the establishment of a pilot cloud practically "at home" with the ability to adjust the width of the emulation channel and delays in data transmission. It also describes architecture and configuration of the experimental setup. The proposed modular structure can be expanded by available computing power.Comment: 5 page