SC19 BoF - Quality Assurance and Coding Standards for Parallel Software

Date: Thu Nov 21, 12:15pm-1:15pm

Place: SC19 at Colorado Convention Center, Denver, CO

Room: 505

Join us on the mailing list to receive relevant updates and dicussions: https://groups.io/g/parallel-code-qa-sc19-bof

SC19 BoF webpage: https://sc19.supercomputing.org/presentation/?id=bof164&sess=sess316

đź“„ Slides: BoF-slides.pdf

This BoF brough together 6 world-class speakers for a total of 33 attendees.

Abstract

The automation of testing is critical in software development to improve quality assurance (QA), but today 80% of testing is manual (Gartner) and $32 billion is spent annually on QA (IDC/Nelson Hall). Coding standards in automotive and cybersecurity (e.g. CWE, MISRA) provide developers with rules and recommendations to prevent faulty code patterns. The ever-increasing complexity of HPC software and hardware pushes the developers to critically reevaluate testing methods, but there is no coding standard for parallel programming yet. Our goal is to form a community interested in quality assurance and best practices for parallel programming.

Long Description

Goals

The goal of this BoF is to bring together members of the HPC community interested in quality assurance and best practices for the development of parallel software on a wide range of hardware architectures.

Topics

  1. The HPC perspective: The importance of developing Better Scientific Software to manage the evergrowing complexity of HPC software, and the role of DevOps/CD, reusable components, etc… in increasing the quality of HPC software.
  2. The current status of coding standards in HPC: Early experiences in creating benchmark suites of rules and recommendations to improve quality assurance and ensure best practices in developing parallel software. DataRaceBench is a benchmark suite designed to systematically and quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness of data race detection tools. It includes a set of OpenMP microbenchmarks with and without data races.
  3. Coding standards as a way to facilitate Quality Assurance: Successful experiences providing software developers with rules and recommendations to fix faulty code patterns in functional safety and cybersecurity through coding standards like CWE and MISRA.
  4. The industry perspective: The importance of Quality Assurance and Testing in HPC, from supercomputing centers to universities, and from startups to Fortune500 companies.

Relevance

Parallel programming is challenging and, thus, quality assurance and coding standards are critical for HPC programmers, particularly for industry and novice programmers. This BoF shall leverage the expertise of senior developers in parallel programming and record it in such a way that it can be validated and reused by the HPC community.

Outcome

We will collect best practices for parallel programming and derive a structured plan to develop the first version of a coding standard. We will share this information with interested parties via a report of the BoF. Furthermore, we will form a specialized group to continue this collection of best practices and standardization efforts and implement means of communication for this group.

Panelists

Organizers