HSF Seminar - Balancing accuracy, performance, and maintainability in research software

Wednesday 26 Mar 2025, 16:30 → 18:00 Europe/Zurich

160/R-009 (CERN)

 

The HEP Software Foundation

The HEP Software Foundation facilitates copperation and common efforts in High Energy Physics software and computing internationally. 
There are several focus activity areas: Data analysis, detector simulation, physics generators, pyHEP, Julia in HEP, reconstruction and software triggers, software developer tools and packaging, and training.
The HSF hosts workshops, provides strategic input and generally raises awareness on the importance of HEP software.

Sign up to HSF mailing lists here.

HSF Seminars

HSF Seminars were kick started in October 2024, and will be hosted on the last Wednesday of each month. Presentations are nominally recorded and put on YouTube - see our channel.
See the full HSF seminar series on indico here!

Sign up to announcements for future HSF seminars as well as other HSF events by joining hsf-forum@googlegroups.com (sign up instructions).

Have a seminar topic idea? Send an email to hsf-seminar-conveners@googlegroups.com (current organisers are Nicole Skidmore, Michel Jouvin and Claire Antel)

 

16:30 → 16:35 Introduction

Speakers: Claire Antel (Universite de Geneve (CH)), Michel Jouvin (Université Paris-Saclay (FR)), Dr Nicole Skidmore (University of Warwick)

16:35 → 17:20 Balancing accuracy, performance, and maintainability in research software

Abstract:
Technical debt refers to short-term optimizations that may lead to longer-term consequences in the software project. Spoiler alert - it happens in research software as well. In this talk, I will share some findings from studies my group has done into the nature of technical debt in research software projects, both large and small. Key is to do tradeoff analysis of your important project qualities, like accuracy or performance. Using a combination of interviews, surveys, and quantitative analysis, we present some insights into how different projects perceive technical debt, how they resolve it, and how technical debt has a different flavour in research software. I will conclude with some ongoing work on using AI to fill in domain knowledge gaps.

Speaker:
Neil Ernst, PhD, is an associate professor at the University of Victoria in the Department of Computer Science and Director, Matrix Institute for Data Science. He is a world-leading researcher in software architecture and requirements. His research focuses on building next generation software systems. He leverages past experience consulting with large government stakeholders and empirical datasets on software development and analysis. Current projects include technical debt in scientific software, climate informatics, and the impacts of AI on human aspects of software development.

Balancing Accuracy, Performance, and Maintainability in Research Software.pdf

YouTube link