MocDown and Python Threading - George Zhang, Phil Gorman, Ross Barnowski

October 15, 2014 at 5-6:30pm in BIDS, 190 Doe Library

Attending

Discussion: MocDown

George Zhang and Phil Gorman

George and Phil are both PhD students in the Berkeley neutronics group.

MocDown

MocDown is a neutron transport, transmutation, thermal fluids, and equilibrium search tool developed here at Berkeley primarily by Jeffrey Seifried.

George and Phil covered :

Code examples and documentation can be found at the homepage.

Discussion: Threading with Python

Ross Barnowski

Ross Barnowski is a PhD student in Kai Vetter’s research group. His work focuses on nuclear instrumentation, including a 3D gamma ray imaging cart called the Compact Compton Imager II.

Threading in Python

Ross gave a talk that covered the concept of concurrency as well as how to make it happen in Python.

Code examples can be found here.

To see the ipython notebook in the notebook viewer try this link: Concurrency Notebook.

Lightning Talks

Kelly : Test Your Code

Kelly, after having dedicated a ton of time this summer to building tests for the WARP code, now has a test suite for it. When her colleague, the main WARP developer, made an update to the API, her tests caught it (by failing) and she was alerted to the global effects of the change. Moral of the story: test your code!

Aaron Culich : BRC

Aside: One of the places where tests break down is in concurrency, actually! Aaron recommends a paper “The Problem With Threads” by Edward Lee. He also offers us some choice quotes:

“…non-trivial multi-threaded programs are incomprehensible to humans.”

and

“Threads must be relegated to the engine room of computing, to be suffered only by expert technology providers.”

Aaron also passed out a little handout about BRC. He encourages folks to reach out to him (as part of the Consulting and Community initiative). One of the ways for him to help out is here with THW, where he wants to hear our needs and feedback.

They’ve already benefitted from our feedback concerning Savio here. Please feel free to add more information to that file with a pull request.

Share