Hear, hear! On Wed, Mar 9, 2016 at 10:10 AM, Peter Steinbach <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi to all, > > I just wanted to share some insights that I made during a GPU focused > hackathon last week. For the full glory of details, see a series of blog > posts on Eurohack 2016 in Dresden (Germany): > https://gcoe-dresden.de/?page_id=4 > > The hackathon had 6 teams come into Dresden with their HPC codes. The goal > was to accelerate the apps to run on GPUs using a more recent programming > paradigm called OpenACC as well as traditional CUDA. The codes were from > weather forecasting (CFD based), simulating rescue paths for fire fighters > in underground stations (also CFD based), correlating genomics with neuron > activity (a matlab port), polymer simulation, bacteria simulation and > planet hunting in interferrometric astronomy data (python based). > > First observation, 2 out of 6 teams came with unit tests at all! The team > I mentored had a minimal test tool that compared the ascii output of a > simulation run with some reference output - so something on the level of an > integration test with the full application. > We spent 2 days trying to understand the code and hunting bugs in an > existing GPU based execution path which gave different results than the > legacy CPU part. As we only had integration style tests, this was a tedious > process as the code base was ~70 kloc large. At some point we ditched the > existing GPU implementation and started from scratch. > I have to say that my team was very open to new ideas and promised to look > into unit testing and the like, we didn't have time to refactor the code to > become (unit) testable. If they'll do it, I don't know as it depends mostly > on social factors. > > Bottom line for SWC: defensive programming and testing are important and > we should try to keep it in the curriculum as much as possible. My team > were 3 meteorologists that received introductory level fortran training > during their studies - nothing more. > > Best, > Peter > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > > http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org >
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