Charles R. Ferenbaugh

Charles R. Ferenbaugh

In recent years, code projects in the nuclear weapons program at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) have given increased attention to modern software productivity practices. We found that some of the biggest barriers to adoption of new practices were not technical but cultural. This paper describes several of the cultural differences between the physics and computer science communities at LANL.

Charles R. Ferenbaugh

In the process of rewriting large physics codes at Los Alamos National Laboratory to perform well on new architectures such as many-core, GPU, and Intel MIC, we have found a number of areas in which sustainable software practices can provide significant advantages. We describe several specific advantages of sustainable practices for future architectures, and report on two small experimental projects at LANL intended to raise awareness of new software practices and programming approaches for new architectures.