HPCwire: Software Carpentry for Scientists and Engineers

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August 04, 2006

Software Carpentry for Scientists and Engineers

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HPCwire recently had the opportunity to talk with Greg Wilson, author of the book "Data Crunching." In this interview, he describes his "Software Carpentry" course, a primer for scientists and engineers who are not professional software developers. This audience often spends a lot of time developing, debugging and maintaining programs, but doesn't have the computer science background to do those tasks effectively or efficiently. Wilson teaches them about the software development process as well as basic proficiency in higher-level programming languages like MATLAB and Python. This allows scientists and engineers to increase quality and productivity, while at the same time taking advantage of the latest advancements in hardware.

HPCwire: What is the history behind the "Software Carpentry" course you've developed and who is the course targeted for?

Wilson: The idea for the course goes all the way back to work I did at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre in the late 1980s and early 1990s. My job was to help parallelize scientific software, but after a while, I realized the real problem was that most scientists and engineers simply didn't know how to develop code efficiently: they'd never heard of version control, they didn't know how to test things, they did repetitive tasks by hand instead of writing little scripts for them, and so on.

Starting in about 1997, Brent Gorda (now at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) and I began teaching short courses on basic software development skills at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Response was mixed: some participants, particularly younger ones, ate it up, while others felt that what they'd been doing for the last twenty years was good enough. Over the next three or four years, we figured out which parts of standard industrial software development models actually made sense for HPC, and which didn't. I then taught the course at a few other places (most recently the University of Toronto), then received a grant from an open source organization called the Python Software Foundation to tidy up the notes and make them freely available over the Web.

In its current form, the course is aimed at people who have backgrounds in science or engineering, but not computer science, and who now find themselves having to write or maintain complex programs. It covers basic tools, including the Unix shell, make and version control, introduces students to the Python scripting language, then goes on to look at data crunching, integration, web programming, security, best practices for small teams and other practical issues. All the material is freely available at our website, http://swc.scipy.org, and like most open source projects, we'd welcome more contributions.

HPCwire: How much time would it take for the average non-professional programmer to take the entire course?

Wilson: It takes me about an hour to deliver each of the two dozen or so lectures, and I expect that students will spend two to three hours on exercises for each. When I teach the course again this coming winter, I'll be recording the lectures and posting the MP3s to the web. Then people outside Toronto who want to follow along would be very welcome to -- we had about 70 out-of-towners downloading the lectures and chipping in on the mailing list last fall.

HPCwire: What is the difference between "Software Carpentry" and software engineering?

Wilson: Scale. This course doesn't try to teach people how to build the electronic equivalent of the Channel Tunnel; it's more about drywalling the basement. If you're developing code on your own for your thesis, or working in a team of half a dozen people for a year or two, most of what you need to know is in this course.

HPCwire: As software developers, what do scientists and engineers seem to lack most?

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