Browsing by Author "Hochstein, Lorin"
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Item An Environment of Conducting Families of Software Engineering Experiments(2007-05) Hochstein, Lorin; Nakamura, Taiga; Shull, Forrest; Zazworka, Nico; Voelp, Martin; Zelkowitz, Marvin V.; Basili, Victor R.The classroom is a valuable resource for conducting software engineering experiments. However, coordinating a family of experiments in classroom environments presents a number of challenges to researchers. This paper describes an environment that simplifies the process of collecting, managing and sanitizing data from classroom experiments, while minimizing disruption to natural subject behavior. We have successfully used this environment to study the impact of parallel programming languages on programmer productivity at multiple universities across the United States.Item HPC- The ASC-Alliance projects: A case study of large-scale parallel scientific code development(2006-10-31) Hochstein, Lorin; Basili, Victor R.Computational scientists face many challenges when developing software that runs on large-scale parallel machines. However, their software development processes have not previously been studied in much detail by software engineering researchers. To better understand the nature of software development in this context, we examined five large-scale computational science software projects, known as the ASC-Alliance centers. We conducted interviews with project leads from all five of the centers to gain insight into the nature of the development processes of large-scale parallel code projects, and to identify issues in the current state-of-the-practice that reduce programmer productivity. The results of the interviews are summarized in this report.Item A Pilot Study to Evaluate Development Effort for High Performance Computing(2004-04) Basili, Victor R.; Asgari, Sima; Hochstein, Lorin; Hollingsworth, Jeffrey K.; Shull, Forrest; Zelkowitz, Marvin V.The ability to write programs that execute efficiently on modern parallel computers has not been fully studied. In a DARPA-sponsored project, we are looking at measuring the development time for programs written for high performance computers (HPC). To attack this relatively novel measurement problem, our goal is to initially measure such development time in student programming to evaluate our own experimental protocols. Based on these results, we will generate a set of feasible experimental methods that can then be applied with more confidence to professional expert programmers. This paper describes a first pilot study addressing those goals. We ran an observational study with 15 students in a graduate level High Performance Computing class at the University of Maryland. We collected data concerning development effort, developer activities and chronology, and resulting code performance, for two programming assignments using different HPC development approaches. While we did not find strong correlations between the expected factors, the primary outputs of this study are a set of experimental lessons learned and 12 wellformed hypotheses that will guard future study.