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Workshop on the Computational Science & Engineering Sustainability and Productivity Challenges

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Workshop on the Computational Science & Engineering Sustainability and Productivity Challenges

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Aleksandra Pawlik

Aleksandra Pawlik

SSI fellow

Posted on 18 October 2015

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Workshop on the Computational Science & Engineering Sustainability and Productivity Challenges

Posted by a.pawlik on 18 October 2015 - 1:33am

By Aleksandra Pawlik, Institute's Training group lead.

The Institute recently contributed to the Computational Science & Engineering Software Sustainability and Productivity Challenges (CSESSP Challenges) workshop. The workshop which took place on 15th and 16th October in Washington DC brought together a number of representatives from primarily US research organisations, funding agencies and industry. A white paper discussing SSI's goals and achievements was accepted and presented at the event.

The programme of the workshop was very busy including discussions in breakout groups, reporting back and finally drafting up the key points from every group. The topics covered were:

  • Opportunities from Improved CSE SW Sustainability and Productivity The main goal was to explore the upside of improving our ability to create and sustain software for Computational Science & Engineering. The group worked on characterizing opportunities available for a potential  virtual “National Virtual Software Infrastructure” for CSE software.
  • CSE Software in Industry/Manufacturing The discussion focused on examining the challenges and opportunities facing the use of CSE SW in industry, particularly in Advanced Manufacturing. 
  • Economics of Software Tools This group looked at the issue of developing and maintaining software tools relevant to this critical, challenging domain that has to compete for scarce resources (e.g., skilled personnel) with a mass market for similar tools.
  • Social Sciences Applied to CSE Software Systems The goal was to explore the relevance of the social sciences to understanding the development and sustainment of CSE software systems over decades by groups of individuals with scarce skill sets.
  • Role of Software Engineering Research This discussion focused on investigating how software engineering could play a larger role in CSE software and on identifying opportunities for collaboration, new areas for research, and transition of research to practice in the CSE software community.
  • Measuring Software Productivity and Performance This group examined how metrics, benchmarks and standards can be used to measure the effectiveness of productivity, performance and sustainability goals for CSE software.
  • New Approaches for Faster, More Affordable CSE Software This discussion explored flexible software engineering techniques (product line engineering, model driven architecture etc.); software architectures (cloud platforms, learning systems); system architectures (software defined networking) and business/sustainability models.

During reporting back session it was clear that there is a lot of overlap between these topics and that many challenges stem from similar issues. Some ideas for approaching the identified problems may help address several problems at the same time. 

As a follow up plan a report bringing together the most important conclusions will be written over the course of the coming weeks. The Institute will be contributing to the report.

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