CALL FOR PAPERS
First International Workshop on Software Engineering for Computational Science and Engineering
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Co-located with ICSE 2008 - Leipzig, Germany
http://www.cse.msstate.edu/~SECSE08

Overview
An important type of software that has received little attention from software engineering researchers 
is software developed for computational science and engineering (CS&E) applications. This software is 
vital for the study of many important topics from diverse application domains. A list of the top 500 
supercomputers, for which many, but not all, CS&E applications are written, provides an example of the 
diversity of government, scientific, and commercial organizations that use CS&E and highlights its 
growing prevalence and impact on modern society. As an example of the importance and diversity of the 
types of problems addressed through CS&E, a recent article in the Computing Research News listed 
topics being addressed with CS&E at Los Alamos National Laboratory, including designing and 
maintaining nuclear weapons, simulation of the public infrastructure, climate change, HIV vaccines, 
defense against radiological attacks, and astrophysics. In addition to these topics, other institutions 
are using CS&E to study problems related to crash simulation, satellite data processing, bioinformatics, 
and financial modeling. In addition, there are plenty of more modest CS&E applications written in 
research establishments worldwide. Because many of these domains are complex and involve advanced 
scientific or engineering concepts, much of the CS&E software is written by domain experts rather than 
by software engineers. This proposal uses research and education to address the lack of emphasis the 
software engineering community has placed on the development of CS&E software.

Furthermore, the design, implementation, development, and maintenance of CS&E applications can differ 
in significant ways from the systems and development processes more typically studied by the software 
engineering community:
   * The requirements often include conformance to sophisticated mathematical models.  Therefore, the 
     requirements may take the form of an executable model in a system  such as Matlab, with the 
     implementation involving porting to proper platform.
   * Often these projects are exploring unknown science making it difficult to determine  a concrete 
     set of requirements a prioiri.
   * The software development process or "workflow" for CS&E application development may differ 
     profoundly from traditional software engineering processes. For example, one scientific 
     computing workflow, dubbed the "lone researcher", involves a single scientist developing a system 
     to test a hypothesis. Once the system runs correctly   once and returns its results, the scientist
     has no further need of the system. This approach contrasts with more typical software engineering 
     lifecycle models, in which the useful life of the software is expected to begin, not end, after 
     the first correct execution.
   * CS&E applications often require more computing resources than are available on a typical 
     workstation. Existing solutions for providing more computational resources (e.g., clusters, 
     supercomputers, grids) can be difficult to use, resulting in additional software engineering challenges.
   * "Usability" in the context of CS&E application development may revolve around optimization to the 
     machine architecture so that computations complete in a reasonable amount of time. The effort and 
     resources involved in such optimization may exceed initial development of the algorithm. 

Submission Instructions
We encourage submission of position papers or statements of interest from members of the software 
engineering or computational science and engineering communities. Please note that CS&E applications 
are not always written for supercomputer implementation; we are equally interested in the context 
where software is developed on other hardware platforms. Position papers of at most eight pages are 
solicited to address issues including but not limited to:
   * Case studies of software development processes (workflows) used in CS&E applications.
   * Measures of software development productivity appropriate to CS&E applications.
   * Activity and Purpose-based benchmarks for evaluating existing or proposed CS&E  architectures
   * Software engineering metrics and tool support for CS&E applications.
   * The design of empirical studies to better understand the environment, tools, languages, and 
     processes used in CS&E application development and how they might be improved.

The organizing committee hopes for participation from a broad range of stakeholders from across the 
software engineering, computational science/engineering, and grid computing communities. Accepted 
position papers will be posted on the workshop website (http://www.cse.msstate.edu/~SECSE08).

Please observe the following:
   1. Position papers should be at most 8 pages.  
   2. Format your paper according to the ICSE 2008 technical paper guidelines  at 
      http://icse08.upb.de//calls/fsguidelines.html 
   3. Submit your paper in PDF format to SECSE08@cse.msstate.edu 
   4. Deadline for submission: February 24, 2008.
   5. Submission notification: March 21, 2008.

Program Committee:
Jeffrey Carver				Steven Easterbrook			Jeremy Kepner
Mississippi State University		University of Toronto			Lincoln Laboratory
carver@cse.msstate.edu  		sme@cs.toronto.edu  			kepner@ll.mit.edu

Bernd Mohr				Lorin Hochstein				Judith Segal
Forschungszentrum Juelich GmbH	        University of Nebraska-Lincoln		The Open University
b.mohr@fz-juelich.de 			lorin@cse.unl.edu   			J.A.Segal@open.ac.uk