DSLs, DLA, DxT, and MDE in CSE

Abstract

We narrate insights from a collaboration between researchers in Software Engineering (SE) and in the domain of Dense Linear Algebra (DLA) libraries. We highlight our impressions of how software development for computational science has traditionally been different from the development of software in other domains. We observe that scientific software (at least DLA libraries) is often developed by domain experts rather than legions of programmers. For this reason, researchers in SE need to impact the productivity of experts rather than the productivity of the masses. We document this and other lessons learned.