There will be a seminar in the “research programming in practice” series by Dhavide Aruliah University of Ontario Institute of Technology (Oshawa, ON, Canada) on Weds 28th August at 2pm in Drayton B06.

Pseudo-arclength continuation is a well-established framework for generating a curve of numerical solutions of nonlinear equations. In my talk, I will review the basic ideas underlying adaptive predictor-corrector schemes for pseudo-arclength continuation emphasising where the bottle-neck arises in computation of rejected corrector steps. We have been developed a parallel code using standard C and MPI for adapting the step-length in pseudo-arclength continuation. Our method employs several predictor-corrector sequences run concurrently on distinct processors with differing step-lengths. Our parallel framework permits intermediate results of unconverged correction sequences to seed new predictor-corrector sequences with longer step-lengths; the goal is to amortise the cost of corrector steps to make further progress along the underlying numerical curve. I shall describe the essence of the parallel code and some of the issues that arose in its implementation. The goal is to have a straightforward interface to an MPI library into which researchers can plug in their serial C continuation codes to achieve modest improvements with widely available multicore desktop machines. This is joint work with Alexander Dubitski (Amadeus R & D, Toronto) and Lennaert van Veen (UOIT).

Another workshop which I will be at, which should be of interest to readers:

Research software engineers are the people behind research software.
They not only develop the software, they also understand the research
that it makes possible.

Software is a fundamental part of research, and research software
engineers are fundamental to good software. Despite this, the role is
not well understood in the research community. This is something the
Software Sustainability Institute is campaigning to change – starting
with a workshop for research software engineers.

We will bring research software engineers together to talk about new
tools and interesting work, to share ideas with people who do the same
work, and to discuss how we can overcome the problems that are faced by
all research software engineers – like gaining recognition and reward
for their work.

The term research software engineer is new, so many people who fulfil
the role will not describe themselves in this way. To help judge whether
you should attend the workshop, we’ve put together some questions:

1. Are you employed to develop software for researchers?
2. Are you a researcher who now spends more time developing software
than conducting research?
3. Are you employed as a postdoctoral researcher, even though you
predominantly work on software development?
4. Are you the “person who does computers” in your research group?
5. Are you not named on research papers despite playing a fundamental
part in developing the software used to create that research?
6. Do you lack the metrics needed to progress your career in research –
like papers and conference presentations – despite having made a
significant contribution with software?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you should attend the
workshop for research software engineers.

For more information:
http://www.software.ac.uk/workshop-research-software-engineers
Registration: http://workshopforresearchsoftwareengineers.eventbrite.co.uk/