The 2021 SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE21) took place in early March 2021. The meeting was notable for being the first CSE conference held exclusively online—and for hosting the largest number of registered participants in the history of the conference. CSE21 also hosted the largest array of software-focused sessions the conference has seen to date, with contributions from more than 60 different presenters.

The SIAM Computational Science and Engineering conference series has always been a good place to talk about software. SIAM's crowd-sourcing approach to organizing many of its conferences encourages the community to submit to the conference multi-speaker sessions around topics of interest. The organizers of the CSE conference series recognize the centrality of software to the practice of computational science and engineering, and they've always welcomed such topics. While many workshops and conferences focus on new science and new algorithms, at CSE it is also possible to hold discussions about the experience of software development and sustainability. And this year, with the help of sixteen organizers and more than 60 presenters, the conversation around software was one of the most extensive we've seen. There were seven software-focused minisymposia, each including either five or ten speakers, as well as a topical group of posters, or "minisymposterium." For those who registered for CSE21, the minisymposia were recorded, and will be available through the vFairs conference platform until June 2021. In addition, we've collected the presentations and posters from these software-focused sessions to share with the broader community, as hyperlinked below.

Consider joining us in organizing software-focused sessions for future SIAM and other conferences. The 2022 SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing (PP22)—the next conference in CSE's sister series, which alternates years with CSE—will soon be announced. CSE23 has already been announced for February 2023. Look for the call for participation in SIAM conferences to appear about 9-10 months in advance of each event.

Software Productivity and Sustainability for CSE

Collected presentations DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5321423 | SIAM program pages: MS30

This session focused on work that addresses growing technical and social challenges in the quality and sustainability of scientific software as well as the productivity of developers. Topics included software engineering approaches for medium-sized distributed scientific projects, as well as strategies for continuous integration (CI) testing, performance portability, employing user stories to identify software requirements, and workflow for improving software quality.

Organizers
Lois Curfman McInnes, Argonne National Laboratory
Stuart Yates, Swiss National Supercomputing Center

Better Scientific Software Fellowship

Collected presentations DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5321426 | SIAM program pages: MS68

This minisymposium included an introduction to the Better Scientific Software Fellowship Program and talks from several recent fellows describing their work. The program helps expand the community of researchers contributing to the discussion about how to improve developer productivity and software sustainability of scientific codes. The speakers in this session presented work on teaching scientific software development practices to those limited experience, assessing the state of the art in testing practices for scientific software and how to improve them, understanding and tuning floating point precision, and a modular course design for teaching graduate students best practices for development of research software.

Organizers
Hai Ah Nam, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Building Sustainable Software Communities and Sustainable Software

Collected presentations DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5321435 | SIAM program pages: MS94, MS125

Sustainability of software is a major challenge for our community. This session explored some of the highly varied strategies and approaches to building communities capable of sustaining given software packages. Speakers addressed leadership strategies to encourage, enable, and empower contributors, recognizing and leveraging the fact that many R&D projects can be thought of as a "team of teams", and the value of particular practices, such as DevOps, the Agile retrospective, and community policies. Other speakers brought experiences with sustainable software from areas including computational molecular sciences, geophysics, subsurface flow, numerical libraries, and tools for code coupling and building and installing software.

Organizers
David E. Bernholdt, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Rene Gassmoeller, University of Florida

Exascale Computing Project Performance Portability Analysis

Collected presentations DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5321441 | SIAM program pages: MS162, MS192

The U.S. Exascale Computing Project (ECP) is a broad, multi-year project focused on delivering a capable exascale computing ecosystem. This minisymposium explored the experiences of ECP research teams in achieving portable performance for both the coming generation of exascale computer systems as well as other platforms. Speakers provided perspectives of the U.S. Department of Energy Leadership Computing Facilities and an overview of the ECP's application development areas, along with deeper dives into a variety of scientific and supporting software technology areas: Earth and space science, energy applications, chemistry and materials science, data analytics and data-centric applications, visualization, data management, programming models, and mathematical libraries.

Organizer
Anshu Dubey, Argonne National Laboratory

Data-Driven Analysis of Scientific Software Quality, Availability, and Development Productivity

Collected presentations DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5321444 | SIAM program pages: MS187

The widespread availability of public software development repositories and other data sources has enabled new ways of understanding and even improving software development. This session presented a range of different data-driven activities. One presentation investigated the availability of software mentioned in the literature of a particular domain. Another used machine learning techniques to determine how to identify and fix bugs in Javascript code. Other presentations used a variety of data collection techniques, including repository mining to explore software development practices, interactions between projects, long- and short-term tends and anomalies, and the significance of code changes.

Organizers
Boyana Norris, University of Oregon
Kanika Sood, California State University, Fullerton

Enhancing Sustainability and Productivity of Research Software

Collected presentations DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5325824 | SIAM program pages: MS251, MS278

This minisymposium focused on the growing technical, practical, and social challenges in the productivity, quality and sustainability of research software. Speakers discussed case studies and principles of software sustainability, the entrepreneurial nature of even research software, aspects pertaining to the people behind research software (including affinity groups, training, and diversity in software teams), and tools to assess and improve software sustainability.

Organizers
Rinku Gupta, Argonne National Laboratory
Sandra Gesing, University of Notre Dame

Wash Your Hands, Wear a Mask, Keep the Bugs Out

Collected presentations DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5325827 | SIAM program pages: MS298

This session drew on experiences of several different computational science and engineering (CSE) projects with workflows for development and testing. Speakers offered best practices in testing and continuous integration (CI), advanced git workflows, and other aspects of CSE software development, as well as experiences in using various CI testing frameworks in cloud environments.

Organizers
Vadim Dyadechko, ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company
Roscoe A. Bartlett, Sandia National Laboratories
Todd Gamblin, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Minisymposterium: Software Productivity and Sustainability for CSE

Collected presentations DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5321432 | SIAM program pages: PP7

This topical poster group provided an opportunity for researchers to present a range of topics in the broad area of software productivity and sustainability. Contributions described a number of organizations and projects focused directly on these topics, while others presented tools and approaches to facilitate productivity and sustainability. One poster examined the lessons on software sustainability learned from the decades-long history of a widely-used software tool in one scientific domain.

Organizers
David E. Bernholdt, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Sandra Gesing, University of Notre Dame
Rinku Gupta, Argonne National Laboratory
Shoaib Sufi, University of Manchester

Complementary articles (based on material in these sessions) on the SIAM site

• Encouraging Effective Retrospective Strategies for Team Projects, Lina Sorg,
• Creating Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable Cyberinfrastructure, Jillian Kunze
• Understanding Engineering Curricula to Improve Diversity Within the Field, Lina Sorg
• Inspiring the Next Generation of Software Practitioners through the Better Scientific Software Fellowship Program, Lina Sorg