First Meeting

This was a planning meeting. Katy Huff, Ryan Bergmann, and Professor Rachel Slaybaugh attended. Together we discussed a possible suite of useful software practices to discuss this semester.

What is this?

We discussed that part of the purpose of these meetings is to restart a successful group that originated in Wisconsin, “The Hacker Within.” Ideally, this meeting will facilitate sharing skills and best practices for computational nuclear engineering applications. Last semester, we had a couple such meetings. In spring semester I would like to share a number of skills for scientific software development (testing, data management, version control, literate programming etc. ) and to ask the rest of you to share the skills you have as well. The goal will be to incorporate these practices into our workflows. This would be a great venue for introducing new libraries, showing off useful features of a neutronics code you’re using, or bringing up a computational problem you’re having.

What can be expected?

We decided to try meetings with an agenda structured thus:

• First, we will go around the room and attendees can introduce themselves.
• The meeting will start with one 30-40 minute talk on a topic of import to scientists who use software. Particular emphasis is likely to be paid to topics useful to nuclear engineering researchers. To volunteer to give a talk, mention it at a meeting, or email Katy.
• The talk will be followed by a short period for questions.
• For up to 40 minutes, attendees will have the opportunity to give lightning talks on short topics. These may share a small skill snippet, demonstrate a computational issue you’re having with you’re research, or anything of interest to the group. Sometimes, lighting talk topics will be requested ahead of time on a theme (i.e., text editors). To give a lightning talk, just show up and speak up whe the time comes. If you like, letting Katy know ahead of time is always welcome.
• After the meeting, attendees can hang around in the space and hack together on their research codes, if they like.

What are the topics?

The topics for the first part of the semester will focus on reproducibility:

• command line
• gpus/cuda
• version control
• build systems
• testing
• self documenting code
• cloud computing (amazon ec2, etc.)
• parallelism
• profiling

Lightning Talks

A number of good topics were identified for lightning talks or talk series. If you’re interested in talking about these or something else, just come prepared. If the talk you want to give is in a series, consider banding together a group of folks who would like to give the other parts of the series.

• debugging
• libraries/linking
• scripted plotting
• exceptions
• text editors
• licensing and export control