Position Papers for the ASCR Workshop on the Science of Scientific-Software Development and Use

Technical Report · Wed Dec 01 04:00:00 EST 2021

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1843575· OSTI ID:1843575

Bernholdt, David E. ^[1]; Cary, John ^[2]; Heroux, Michael A. ^[3]; McInnes, Lois Curfman ^[4]

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1. Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
2. Univ. of Colorado, Denver, CO (United States)
3. Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), Albuquerque, NM, and Livermore, CA (United States)
4. Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)

Software is an increasingly important component in the pursuit of scientific discovery. Both its development and use are essential activities for many scientific teams. At the same time, very little scientific study has been conducted to understand, characterize, and improve the development and use of software for science. Computational science teams have diversified over time to include contributions from domain scientists who provide expertise in scientific and engineering disciplines, applied mathematicians and computer scientists who provide optimal algorithms and data structures, and software and data engineers who provide methodologies and tools adapted and adopted from other software domains. These diverse contributions have enabled tremendous advances in the pursuit of scientific discovery, even as models, computer architectures, and software environments have become more complicated. With this increasing diversity, we believe the next opportunity for qualitative improvement comes from applying the scientific method to understanding, characterizing, and improving how scientific software is developed and used. We believe that this pursuit requires expertise from computational scientists themselves, and from the cognitive and social sciences as well as the software engineering research community. As we look to increase the productivity and sustainability of the scientific-software-development-and-use cycle, a more systematic application of the scientific method to understand processes for software development and use will be a valuable tool to guide future work and result in more usable and sustainable software. This workshop will bring together computer scientists, software engineering researchers, computational scientists, applied mathematicians, social scientists, cognitive scientists, and others, to explore how we can conduct such systematic investigations, what can be learned, and how doing so will benefit the scientific enterprise. The workshop will be structured around a set of breakout sessions, with every attendee expected to participate actively in the discussions. Afterward, workshop attendees — from DOE, industry, and academia — will produce a report for ASCR that summarizes the findings of the workshop.

• Research Organization: US Department of Energy (USDOE), Washington DC (United States). Office of Science
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR)
• OSTI ID: 1843575
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

42 ENGINEERING
97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING