Practical methods to improve the development of computational software
- Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Texas, Austin (United States)
The use of computation has become ubiquitous in science and engineering. As the complexity of computer codes has increased, so has the need for robust methods to minimize errors. Past work has show that the number of functional errors is related the number of commands that a code executes. Since the late 1960's, major participants in the field of computation have encouraged the development of best practices for programming to help reduce coder induced error, and this has lead to the emergence of 'software engineering' as a field of study. Best practices for coding and software production have now evolved and become common in the development of commercial software. These same techniques, however, are largely absent from the development of computational codes by research groups. Many of the best practice techniques from the professional software community would be easy for research groups in nuclear science and engineering to adopt. This paper outlines the history of software engineering, as well as issues in modern scientific computation, and recommends practices that should be adopted by individual scientific programmers and university research groups. (authors)
- Research Organization:
- American Nuclear Society, 555 North Kensington Avenue, La Grange Park, IL 60526 (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 22212893
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: M and C 2013: 2013 International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering, Sun Valley, ID (United States), 5-9 May 2013; Other Information: Country of input: France; 26 refs.; Related Information: In: Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering - M and C 2013| 3016 p.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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