This event is a part of the "Best Practices for HPC Software Developers" webinar series, produced by the IDEAS Productivity family of projects. The HPC Best Practices webinars address issues faced by developers of computational science and engineering (CSE) software on high-performance computers (HPC) and occur approximately monthly.
| Resource Information | Details |
|---|---|
| Webinar Title | Getting it Right: System Testing of Scientific Software |
| Date and Time | 2024-05-15 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm EDT |
| Presenter | Myra Cohen (Iowa State University) |
| Registration, Information, and Archives | https://ideas-productivity.org/events/hpcbp-083-gettingitright |
| Presentation Language | English |
Webinars are free and open to the public, but advance registration is required through the Event website. Archives (recording, slides, Q&A) will be posted at the same link soon after the event, and all registrants will be notified.
Abstract
Testing software to ensure its correctness is a challenging yet critical task that can consume more than 50% of the software lifecycle. Over the past decade, we have built software testing practices into our development frameworks and are embracing the use of unit tests and continuous integration–testing as we code. However, these types of tests focus heavily on covering individual code elements and may miss important system-level requirements. In scientific software, we often model complex behaviors, and our applications are heavily data-driven and configurable. In addition, we have added machine learning components into this mix. Together, this situation can leave our systems vulnerable to subtle, incorrect behaviors, which can impact our scientific results. In this talk, I will discuss system testing for scientific software, present some challenges, such as configurability, and present some techniques we can use to help improve the testing process.
Presenter
- Myra Cohen (Iowa State University)
Presenter Bio
Myra Cohen is a professor of computer science at Iowa State University, where she holds the Lahn and Oahn Chair in software engineering. She is also a 2023 Better Scientific Software Fellow. Her research expertise is in systems software testing, with an emphasis on systems that are highly configurable (or customizable). She also has a strong interest in synergies between synthetic and systems biology and software engineering, which have many parallels and can benefit from similar testing approaches; she uses many bio-inspired algorithms in her research. She is an IEEE Senior Member and an ACM Distinguished Scientist.
