Hi all - Just wanted to pass along information on a workshop to be held in April at the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI: http://www.samsi.info/about/what- samsi) in North Carolina.
In this workshop, participants will learn the basics of effective code construction and management. They will gain experience with software repository tools, which enhance the communication between members of a research team and allow archival of development benchmarks to ease the transition for new members of the development team. They will also learn the basics associated with incorporating third-party software, including building appropriate makefiles and ensuring seamless integration of sometimes conflicting environments. Finally, they will learn basic techniques for navigating between different platforms and developing regression tests for their development efforts. The target audience will be researchers at the graduate level and beyond who are or will be actively developing code, using complex simulation tools, and/or processing complex data sets to further their efforts in large-system ecological research. Towards that end, the workshop is intended to bring together and foster collaborations between researchers in need of sophisticated simulation tools and those whose work focuses on developing these tools and making them accessible to the community. Each day will begin with a motivating lecture from a member of the computational ecology community. During the late afternoon of the first day, participants will be asked to participate in a round of lightning talks, where they will present their current research problems (in three minutes or less) to the audience. The objective of these lighting talks is to identify possible collaborative teams early as well as to identify needs of participants and adjust lecture content accordingly. The first three days of the workshop will also consist of interactive tutorials led by instructors who actively work on development of simulation codes for large-scale, physics-based problems. Participants will spend time in break-out groups organized by topic, thus providing a forum for open discussion. The remaining two days will consist of break-out sessions where participants will work on development efforts of common interest. Note that the entire schedule of the workshop is geared towards bringing communities together to resolve complex problems; we expect teams to be coalescing all week, and that collaborations are initiated well before the final two days. More info and registration here (application deadline: Monday, March 9, 2015): http://www.samsi.info/workshop/2014-15-ecol-developing-maintaining-and-employing- large-computational-frameworks-ecological Best, Naupaka
