Outreach for Better Scientific Software

Historically, there have been many impediments to widespread improvement in the software development practices in the scientific and HPC software communities, a situation which has clear implications for the credibility of the resulting software. Professional reward systems tend to place far more emphasis on scientific results than on software; workshops and journals that welcome discussions of software and the software development experience are still very limited. Researchers are not trained in software engineering, and there is limited and sometimes conflicting information about which software engineering practices are useful in scientific computing and how to implement them in environments which may differ significantly from the typical commercial software settings in which they were typically developed. In this talk, I will discuss some of the strategies the IDEAS Productivity project has been pursuing to try to enhance awareness and bring relevant resources to the community through a broad range of outreach activities. And I hope to engage the audience in discussions of how they can contribute as well.