Second Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences

(Before It's News)

The Second Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE2) was held on Sunday, November 16, 2014, in New Orleans, in conjunction with Supercomputing ’14.  Broadly speaking, the WSSSPE events aim to provide a cross-discipline forum for a discussion of the challenges involved in developing sustainable software and in encouraging the development of skills needed to deploy and maintain such software.

You can read about the workshop here, and I list some useful links below:

• Twitter hashtag: #wssspe
• Google doc for live community notes/comments
• Live stream of keynotes & lightning talks: http://ustre.am/17ddh
• Evaluation for SC14 Workshop: http://bit.ly/sc14-eval

There were five broad themes at the workshop:

The agenda page contains links to the presentations and papers for these themes, explored as break-out sessions. To give a sense of the flavor of the contributions, here are some of them:

Robert Downs, W. Christopher Lenhardt, Erin Robinson, Ethan Davis and Nicholas Weber. Community Recommendations for Sustainable Scientific Software

Michael R. Crusoe and C.Titus Brown. Channeling community contributions to scientific software: a hackathon experience

Ian Kelley. Publish or perish: the credit deficit to making software and generating data

Jakob Blomer, Dario Berzano, Predrag Buncic, Ioannis Charalampidis, Gerardo Ganis, George Lestaris and René Meusel. The Need for a Versioned Data Analysis Software Environment

Thomas Clune, Michael Rilee and Damian Rouson. Testing as an Essential Process for Developing and Maintaining Scientific SoftwareMarian Petre and Greg Wilson. Code Review For and By Scientists

There were two keynote addresses

Designing for Truth, Scale, and Sustainability, by Kaitlin Thaney (Director, Mozilla Science Lab).

“Abstract: Modern day research, for all of the successes reported in scholarly circles, is not operating at optimal speed. Now with more resources than ever in terms of compute power, access to information and hardware, we’re still facing friction in the system. What infrastructure is needed to facilitate more efficient and accessible research? What considerations are there for advancing scientific discovery in a sustainable fashion for research not only like the web but of the web? This talk will explore the system design and societal considerations associated with sustainable scientific discovery in a distributed, open fashion.”

and

We are the 92%  by Neil Chue Hong (Director, Software Sustainability Institute)

See the slides at http://wl.figshare.com/articles/1243288/embed?show_title=1

Abstract: In a recent survey of UK research-intensive universities, 92% of researchers said they used research software and 68% said their research would be impossible without software. Yet 71% have had no formal software training, and few are ready to apply many of the things we take for granted such as testing or virtualisation. WSSSPE represents the pinnacle of what we understand to be the best practice around scientific software in our community. My talk will challenge the workshop participants to come up with ways of taking this best practice to those 92% of researchers in a way that will lead to maximum benefit to the scientific community.”

• Is HDF5 a good format to replace UVFITS?
• Review of A Hack Day: Coding Comes to the U.K. National Astronomy Meeting (NAM)
• How Should Astronomy Pay For Software?
• From The Front Lines of ADASS 2014 – Visualization
• Astronomical Data Formats – Past, Present and Future ADASS BOF Session
• The Front Lines of ADASS 2014 – October 6 2014 Morning Sessions
• The Front Lines of ADASS 2014 – October 5 2014
• Valuing Software and Other Research Outputs – Talk by Dan Katz.
• New Technique Offers Spray-On Solar Power
• Leopard Complex Spotting And Congenital Night Blindness – Ancient Horse DNA Reveals Human Breeding Preferences