Making it easier to understand research software impact

How can we make it easier to understand research software impact? Is it easy for new researchers to start research in this area? In particular, are the tools available that would let them generate the research that we as the research software community require to convince our funders, fellow researchers and the public at large that having sustainable, open-use research software is important?</p

The 4th International Workshop on Software Engineering for HPC in Computational Science and Engineering

Despite the increasing demand for utilizing high-performance computing (HPC) for CSE applications, software development for HPC historically attracted little attention from the software engineering (SE) community. Paradoxically, the HPC CSE community has increasingly been adopting SE techniques and tools. Indeed, the development of CSE software for HPC differs significantly from the development of more traditional business information systems, from which many SE best practices and tools have been drawn. The workshop summarized in this column, the fourth in the series to be collocated with the Supercomputing conference series, examined two main topics: testing and tradeoffs. Through presentations of work in this area and structured group discussions, the participants highlighted some of the key issues, as well as indicated the direction the community needs to go. In particular, there is a need for more high-quality research in this area that we can use as an evidence base to help developers of CSE applications change practice and benefit from advances in software engineering.</p

Simplifying the Development, Use and Sustainability of HPC Software

Developing software to undertake complex, compute-intensive scientific processes requires a challenging combination of both specialist domain knowledge and software development skills to convert this knowledge into efficient code. As computational platforms become increasingly heterogeneous and newer types of platform such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing become more widely accepted for HPC computations, scientists require more support from computer scientists and resource providers to develop efficient code and make optimal use of the resources available to them. As part of the libhpc stage 1 and 2 projects we are developing a framework to provide a richer means of job specification and efficient execution of complex scientific software on heterogeneous infrastructure. The use of such frameworks has implications for the sustainability of scientific software. In this paper we set out our developing understanding of these challenges based on work carried out in the libhpc project.Comment: 4 page position paper, submission to WSSSPE13 worksho

Report on the Second Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE2)

This technical report records and discusses the Second Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE2). The report includes a description of the alternative, experimental submission and review process, two workshop keynote presentations, a series of lightning talks, a discussion on sustainability, and five discussions from the topic areas of exploring sustainability; software development experiences; credit & incentives; reproducibility & reuse & sharing; and code testing & code review. For each topic, the report includes a list of tangible actions that were proposed and that would lead to potential change. The workshop recognized that reliance on scientific software is pervasive in all areas of world-leading research today. The workshop participants then proceeded to explore different perspectives on the concept of sustainability. Key enablers and barriers of sustainable scientific software were identified from their experiences. In addition, recommendations with new requirements such as software credit files and software prize frameworks were outlined for improving practices in sustainable software engineering. There was also broad consensus that formal training in software development or engineering was rare among the practitioners. Significant strides need to be made in building a sense of community via training in software and technical practices, on increasing their size and scope, and on better integrating them directly into graduate education programs. Finally, journals can define and publish policies to improve reproducibility, whereas reviewers can insist that authors provide sufficient information and access to data and software to allow them reproduce the results in the paper. Hence a list of criteria is compiled for journals to provide to reviewers so as to make it easier to review software submitted for publication as a “Software Paper.