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CALL FOR PAPERS

First International Workshop on Software Engineering for Computational
Science and Engineering
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Co-located with ICSE 2008 - Leipzig, Germany
http://www.cse.msstate.edu/~SECSE08

Overview
An important type of software that has received little
attention from software engineering researchers is software developed
for computational science and engineering (CS&E) applications. This
software is vital for the study of many important topics from diverse
application domains. A list of the top 500 supercomputers, for which
many, but not all, CS&E applications are written, provides an example
of the diversity of government, scientific, and commercial
organizations that use CS&E and highlights its growing prevalence and
impact on modern society. As an example of the importance and
diversity of the types of problems addressed through CS&E, a recent
article in the Computing Research News listed topics being addressed
with CS&E at Los Alamos National Laboratory, including designing and
maintaining nuclear weapons, simulation of the public infrastructure,
climate change, HIV vaccines, defense against radiological attacks,
and astrophysics. In addition to these topics, other institutions are
using CS&E to study problems related to crash simulation, satellite
data processing, bioinformatics, and financial modeling. In addition,
there are plenty of more modest CS&E applications written in research
establishments worldwide. Because many of these domains are complex
and involve advanced scientific or engineering concepts, much of the
CS&E software is written by domain experts rather than by software
engineers. This proposal uses research and education to address the
lack of emphasis the software engineering community has placed on the
development of CS&E software.

Furthermore, the design, implementation, development, and maintenance
of CS&E applications can differ in significant ways from the systems
and development processes more typically studied by the software
engineering community:

• The requirements often include conformance to sophisticated mathematical models. Therefore, the requirements may take the form of an executable model in a system such as Matlab, with the implementation involving porting to proper platform.

• Often these projects are exploring unknown science making it difficult to determine a concrete set of requirements a prioiri.

• The software development process or "workflow" for CS&E application development may differ profoundly from traditional software engineering processes. For example, one scientific computing workflow, dubbed the "lone researcher", involves a single scientist developing a system to test a hypothesis. Once the system runs correctly once and returns its results, the scientist has no further need of the system. This approach contrasts with more typical software engineering lifecycle models, in which the useful life of the software is expected to begin, not end, after the first correct execution.

• CS&E applications often require more computing resources than are available on a typical workstation. Existing solutions for providing more computational resources (e.g., clusters, supercomputers, grids) can be difficult to use, resulting in additional software engineering challenges.

• "Usability" in the context of CS&E application development may revolve around optimization to the machine architecture so that computations complete in a reasonable amount of time. The effort and resources involved in such optimization may exceed initial developmentof the algorithm.

Submission Instructions
We encourage submission of position papers or statements of interest
from members of the software
engineering or computational science and engineering communities.
Please note that CS&E applications
are not always written for supercomputer implementation; we are
equally interested in the context
where software is developed on other hardware platforms. Position
papers of at most eight pages are
solicited to address issues including but not limited to:

• Case studies of software development processes (workflows) used in CS&E applications.
• Measures of software development productivity appropriate to CS&E applications.
• Activity and Purpose-based benchmarks for evaluating existing or proposed CS&E architectures
• Software engineering metrics and tool support for CS&E applications.
• The design of empirical studies to better understand the environment, tools, languages, and processes used in CS&E application development and how they might be improved.

The organizing committee hopes for participation from a broad range of
stakeholders from across the
software engineering, computational science/engineering, and grid
computing communities. Accepted
position papers will be posted on the workshop website (http://www.cse.msstate.edu/~SECSE08
).

Please observe the following:
1. Position papers should be at most 8 pages.
2. Format your paper according to the ICSE 2008 technical paper
guidelines at
http://icse08.upb.de//calls/fsguidelines.html
3. Submit your paper in PDF format to SECSE08@cse.msstate.edu
4. Deadline for submission: February 24, 2008.
5. Submission notification: March 21, 2008.

Program Committee:
Jeffrey Carver Steven Easterbrook Jeremy Kepner
Mississippi State University University of Toronto Lincoln Laboratory
carver@cse.msstate.edu sme@cs.toronto.edu kepner@ll.mit.edu

Bernd Mohr Lorin Hochstein Judith Segal
Forschungszentrum Juelich GmbH University of Nebraska-Lincoln The Open
University
b.mohr@fz-juelich.de lorin@cse.unl.edu J.A.Segal@open.ac.uk