Portability testing of scientific computing software systems

Abstract

Software testing is considered to be the ultimate obstacle before software can be released. Traditional approaches to testing the software revolves around capabilities of a system using various types of testing (e.g., black-box) at various level of software development process. Testing the software for system-wide qualities such as portability is very rare. The research work in this area is very limited. In this work, we discuss the importance of portability testing and attempt to explore a testing approach to test the portability of Scientific Computing (SC) software using different platforms. The main incentive for testing of SC software is that this class of software is challenging because of the elements such as computing environment, computational mathematics, languages, optimization; these elements play significant roles in success or failure of these systems.