SHF: Small: Generation of Scientific Software Libraries

提高专家的工作效率对软件开发至关重要。尤其是在科学计算领域，专家很少，他们的任务是开发软件库，学术界、政府实验室和工业的科学计算研究都依赖于这些软件库。该项目致力于创建编程实践和工具，使自然科学图书馆的发展发生革命性的变化。通过对某个领域的科学、数学和软件方面的专家知识进行编码，一种称为转换设计(Design by Transform，DxT)的变革性方法可以自动生成专家必须手动编写的软件。DxT-生成速度更快、成本更低，并且生成更可信的代码。在密集的线性代数库中，DxT暴露了手动编写的代码中的错误，并发现了比专家生成的算法更快的算法。这项研究将DxT应用于三个新的软件领域：容错稠密线性代数、图分析和张量计算。虽然提高软件库的性能本身将对国家实验室和行业产生影响，但从自动化软件开发中学到的经验将产生广泛的影响。随着硬件复杂性的发展(例如，多核、多核、协处理器和GPU)，SC软件也变得越来越复杂。自动生成将帮助专家在这项日益复杂的工程努力中更有效率。它将使美国科学家和工程师保持他们在科学图书馆工程方面的优势。此外，有证据表明，DxT工程方法在教授学生和新工程师关于软件的知识方面具有教学价值。对新域进行编码将测试这些好处。

Making experts more productive is critically important to software development. This is particularly so in Scientific Computing (SC) where experts are rare and whose task is to develop software libraries on which SC research in academia, government labs, and industry depends. This project strives to create programming practices and tools that will revolutionize library development in SC. By encoding expert knowledge about the science, mathematics, and software of a domain, a transformative approach called Design by Transformation (DxT) can automatically generate software that experts would have to write manually. DxT-generation is faster, cheaper, and produces better-trusted code. In dense linear algebra libraries, DxT has exposed errors in manually-written code and found faster algorithms than those produced by experts. This research applies DxT to three new software domains: fault-tolerant dense linear algebra, graph analysis, and tensor computation. While improving the performance of their software libraries will itself have an impact in national labs and industry, the lessons learned about automating software development will have broad effects. SC software is growing more complicated as hardware complexity evolves (e.g., multi-core, many-core, co-processors, and GPUs). Automatic generation will aid experts in being more productive in this increasingly complicated engineering endeavor. It will enable American scientists and engineers to maintain their advantage in scientific library engineering. Further, there is evidence that the DxT approach to engineering has a pedagogical value in teaching students and new engineers about software. Encoding new domains will test these benefits.