Welcome to Better Scientific Software

The Better Scientific Software tutorial will be presented on Tuesday 10 November 2020 as part of the Supercomputing 2020 (SC20) conference. Registration for the tutorial program (“TUT”) will be required to participate.

This site will provide late-breaking updates and additional information and resources for participants in the tutorial. Expect updates to this site up to, and perhaps shortly after, the date of the tutorial.

Last update: 2020-11-09

Table of Contents

How to Participate

  • Registration for the tutorial program (“TUT”) is required. You can register at any time up to 16 December 2020 to get access to the recorded version of the tutorial for up to 6 months.

  • Most presentations have been pre-recorded, though there are several live sessions interspersed.

  • Please use the question tool to ask questions at any time. The speaker and the rest of the tutorial team will be monitoring and will respond. If you’re also interested in a question, feel free to add points to make it more visible to the tutorial team. There is also a chat channel, which can be used for extended follow-up discussions.

  • The schedule includes a break in the middle, where we plan to do more Q&A and if there is interest, some demos from the hands-on exercises. There is also a segment at the end for additional Q&A and demos.

  • Participation in the Q&A and demonstrations is optional – we know you need breaks too.

  • Your feedback is important both to us and to the SC20 organizers. Please remember to evaluate us! of follow the Evaluation link in the tutorial’s page on the EventScribe site. Evaluations can be submitted through 20 December 2020.

  • You might also be interested in attending these other “software-related” events at SC20.

Stay in Touch

  • After the tutorial, or if you’re not able to participate in the live session, please feel free to email the BSSw tutorial team at bssw-tutorial@lists.mcs.anl.gov.

  • If you want to do the hands-on exercises on your own, we’re happy to provide feedback on your pull requests.

  • To find out about future events organized by the IDEAS Productivity Project, you can subscribe to our mailing list (usually ~2 messages/month).

  • For monthly updates on the Better Scientific Software site, subscribe to our monthly digest.

Presentation Slides

  • The latest version of the slides will always be available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12994376.
    • Note that these files may include additional slides that will not be discussed during the tutorial, but questions are welcome.
  • Errata (References are to versions of the FigShare DOI. The unversioned link above always retrieves the latest. Specific older versions are available if you dig into the interface.)
    • v3: Updates to intro slides (module 00) with adjustments for the event platform and a list of additional software-related events at SC20.
    • v2: Corrected “License, Citation, and Acknowledgements” slides in modules 02 and 05.
    • v1: Same as distributed through SC20.

Agenda

The live presentation takes place 2:30-6:30pm ET, Tuesday 10 November 2020 (19:30-23:30 UTC).

Time (EST) Module Topic Speaker Time (UTC)
2:30pm-2:35pm 00 Introduction David E. Bernholdt, ORNL 19:30-19:35
2:35pm-2:45pm 01 Motivation and Overview of Best Practices in HPC Software Development David E. Bernholdt, ORNL 19:35-19:45
2:45pm-3:15pm 02 Agile Methodologies Rinku Gupta, ANL 19:45-20:15
3:15pm-3:30pm 03 Git Workflows Patricia Grubel, LANL 20:15-20:30
3:30pm-4:00pm 04 Software Design Anshu Dubey, ANL 20:30-21:00
4:00pm-4:15pm 05 Software Testing 1 Rinku Gupta, ANL 21:00-21:15
4:15pm-4:35pm   Beak (live Q&A and demo of Kanban hands-on activities) David E. Bernholdt and All 21:15-21:35
4:35pm-4:50pm 06 Software Testing 2 Anshu Dubey, ANL 21:35-21:50
4:50pm-5:35pm 07 Refactoring Anshu Dubey, ANL 21:50-22:35
5:35pm-5:50pm 08 Continuous Integration David E. Bernholdt, ORNL 22:35-22:50
5:50pm-6:05pm 09 Reproducibility Patricia Grubel, LANL 22:50-23:05
6:05pm-6:10pm 10 Summary David E. Bernholdt, ORNL 23:05-23:10
6:10pm-6:30pm   Live Q&A and demo of CI hands-on activities David E. Bernholdt and All 23:10-23:30

Hands-On Exercises

Introduction

The hands-on exercises for this tutorial are based around a simple numerical model using the one-dimensional heat equation. The example is described briefly in the repository’s README file, and in greater detail in the ATPESC Hands-On lesson. The ATPESC version focuses on the numerical aspects of the model. But for the Better Scientific Software tutorial, we’re focused on how to make the software better from a quality perspective, so you don’t need to understand the math to do these exercises.

For the purposes of the BSSw hands-on exercises, you should imagine you’ve inherited an early version of the hello-numerical-world software from a colleague who’s left the project, and you’ve been assigned to get it into better shape so that it can be used in the next ATPESC summer school.

The repository you’ll be working with is on GitHub: betterscientificsoftware/hello-numerical-world-sc20. Note: most of the screenshots will refer to the generic “hello-numerical-world” repository rather than the one specifically for this tutorial.

List of Hands-On Exercises

Note that the exercise numbers align with the presentation modules. Not every module has exercises (yet).

Supplementary Materials

We gave a full-day version of this tutorial for the Argonne Extreme Scale Training Program (ATPESC) in August 2020. The presentations slides are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12719834. If you want to delve a little deeper into some of the topics we’re covering, consider checking out these resources. We want to particularly draw attention to Module 09 Reproducibility, which we were able to spend 45 minutes on, rather than 15 minutes today. Eventually, they will post recordings of all of the sessions. If you’d like us to notify you when the videos are published, please email us at bssw-tutorial@lists.mcs.anl.gov.

Resources from Presentations

These are the links included in the tutorial presentations, included here for easier access

Requested Citation

The requested citation the overall tutorial is: David E. Bernholdt, Anshu Dubey, Patricia A. Grubel, Rinku K. Gupta, Better Scientific Software tutorial, in SC ‘20: International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, online, 2020. DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.12994376

Individual modules may be cited as Speaker, Module Title, in Better Scientific Software tutorial…

Acknowledgements

The BSSw tutorial is produced by the IDEAS Productivity project.

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR), and by the Exascale Computing Project (17-SC-20-SC), a collaborative effort of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration.