Programming myths, folklore, and recurring bugs

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Basili has enlisted professors teaching graduate courses at eight universities to identify common impediments to effective program development in student projects.  Developers at five ASC Alliance consortia (DOE-supported centers for high-performance computing) compare those impediments to defects professional developers make. (See figure at right.)

All these tools are designed to help high-performance software developers improve their productivity and cut time spent debugging.

“If I give you two orders of magnitude improvement in execution time – if it takes me five years instead of 10 years to develop petascale codes” capable of a quadrillion calculations per second, “Wow! That’s something,” Basili says.

There are relatively few programmers with the knowledge and skills to create code for massively parallel computers – using thousands of processors – and they’re geographically dispersed.  Basili and his team are trying to bring them together in virtual space by creating a knowledge base of best practices for high-performance code development.

Another project aims to determine how developers can best use new programming languages Cray Inc. and IBM are developing for the next generation of computer hardware.

“The petascale project asks, ‘How do we take advantage of these larger and faster machines?’” Basili says.  “But we first have to build this lower-level body of knowledge about what’s important, and now it becomes even more important as the next generation of petascale computers comes on-line.”

His research has led to creation of an experience base for common recurring software defects, or bugs, in high-performance computing.  The team has assembled a wiki – a Web site allowing contributions from multiple authors – to collect patterns of functional bugs, performance bottlenecks, portability problems, and folklore that hamper effective code development.

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