Life at Fraunhofer Center — Maryland Dr Forrest

Life at Fraunhofer Center - Maryland Dr. Forrest Shull Division Director, Measurement & Knowledge Management © Copyright 2007 Fraunhofer Center MD 1

Fraunhofer Center for Empirical Software Engineering (College Park, MD) • Not-for-profit, university-affiliated • Mandate is applied research and technology transfer • Via measurement, evaluation and improvement • We bridge research and application, working with: – Government organizations (Do. D, NASA, …) – Large industrial companies (Boeing, Motorola, …) – Small/medium-sized organizations (Key. Mind, …) – National labs (Los Alamos Labs, …. ) – Universities and research centers (CMU, USC, MIT, …) – …and others (SEI, MITRE, JHU/APL, . . . ) © Copyright 2007 Fraunhofer Center MD 2

An example project: HPCS • US Govt. wants to buy new HPC systems for national labs • Criteria for choosing machines: minimize time to solution (TTS) TTS = Development time + Computing time • Not all labs are the same – Programmers may have different levels of experience • One system may be more productive for experts, another for novices – Problems being solved are different • One system may be better for climate modeling, another for protein folding • Research question: – Which systems / development approaches will result in higher productivity for given users, problem domains, etc. ? © Copyright 2007 Fraunhofer Center MD 3

An example project: HPCS % Effort saved using Open. MP instead of MPI Effort -100 -50 Performance % effort reduction 0 50 100 Effect of model & problem on Buffon Matvec Resistors Life Sharks Performance by problem/HPC model © Copyright 2007 Fraunhofer Center MD 4

A day in the life… • Responsibilities – Project management – Customer deliverables – Business development – Publications & Conference presentations • Rewards – Publications & Conference presentations – Work with… • Many different people • In varied contexts • Doing interesting things – Independence © Copyright 2007 Fraunhofer Center MD 5

How to prepare for a job like this • Read Fred Brooks, “The Computer Scientist as Toolsmith II” – Communications of the ACM, March 1996, 39(3): 61 -68. • Be interested in many different fields and how they use computers and software to accomplish things • Read Victor Basili et al. , “SEL’s Software Process-Improvement Program” – IEEE Software, Nov. 1995, 12(6): 83 -87. • Be interested in research that makes real changes • Be interested in how to reason about the effect of new methods • Read Barry Boehm, “Software Engineering Economics” – Prentice Hall, 1981. • Be interested in choices, decisions and tradeoffs © Copyright 2007 Fraunhofer Center MD 6

How to prepare for a job like this • Spend some time as a software developer and understand the frustrations • Be interested in how humans use technology – And have some background in stats to reason about this • Be attracted to both university and industry © Copyright 2007 Fraunhofer Center MD 7

Backups © Copyright 2007 Fraunhofer Center MD 8

High Dependability Computing Project Goals • • Improve NASA’s ability to build dependable software Define dependability (system & stakeholder perspectives) Investigate, foster, and transfer to practice technologies Use testbeds for technology assessment: scaled-down or preliminary versions of systems in NASA relevant domains which require high dependability, e. g. – Autonomous rover Rocky 7 rover – Air traffic control systems © Copyright 2007 Fraunhofer Center MD 9

Using the Experience Base: The Best Practices Clearinghouse © Copyright 2007 Fraunhofer Center MD 10

Using the Experience Base: The Best Practices Clearinghouse I’m on a security-critical project in an industrial organization. Let me browse practices that help me reach CMMI KPAs. Flexible front-end I’m working in the Do. D and read about Fagan inspections. Is anyone at a similar organization using it? I’m working on an warfighter at an industry contractor organization. Show me practices that can help reduce schedule. © Copyright 2007 Fraunhofer Center MD 11