Need of Software Engineering Methods for High Performance Computing Applications

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an online survey with more than a hundred High Performance Computing (HPC) community members. The goal of the survey was to get a deeper understanding of ongoing HPC projects and the project participants' knowledge about software engineering. Previous and current research give the impression that with software engineering methods adequate for the development of HPC applications time and effort can be saved. But the knowledge of the right and most beneficial methods is not easily available for HPC developers. The results of the survey confirm that there is only little use of software engineering in HPC and, as outlined in the related work section, there is so far no general approach to spread the use of software engineering in the HPC community. But according to our findings, deploying software engineering to facilitate the development of HPC applications is certainly a matter of interest.