Projects Great and Small

Winter Term has officially begun, and we have begun our first Agile sprint! This is very exciting, and very new for all of us. I personally have never worked with an Agile development method, so I think it is the ultimate irony that I volunteered myself to be the Scrum Master.

This week’s required article topic is about clear and concise code, as well as examples of code that fits this requirement, or possibly falls short in some way. In that, my current sprint goal is rather fitting.

My current goal for the week is to download the current CUDA based implementation of our Cluster Dynamics (CD) model to the OSU High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster to run it on our Nvidia GPU cluster, the DGX. After that, I’ll begin looking into porting the code into OpenCL to be used with all types of GPUs, not just Nvidia.

Naturally, when it comes to porting another person’s code or modifying it to run on a different system, clear and concise code is highly desired. In my own limited experience however, beyond even the importance of well written and concise code is the importance of well written comments. Comments are essential for every step of the software development process, from initial development, to deployment, and especially for maintenance and debugging. I, like many of us (don’t deny it), have failed to comment my code from time to time. Like many of us, I assured myself that I wouldn’t be away too long, and my implementation is so simple a monkey could understand it. Three months later, I come back to find myself utterly mystified as to my own thought process.

That is why, whenever I code, I try to follow the old adage to write more comments then code. Does this increase the amount I might have to read, or even write when I code? Yes, but the benefits far outweigh the time costs. Quite frankly, we all owe it to ourselves and our colleagues to write not only concise code, but well documented concise code!

I can’t speak for everyone on my team, but I myself have encountered a number of setbacks already. Not from the code or its implementation, but rather from the weather. While my home state of Oregon is, on the whole, experiencing a significant amount of winter weather, down in Roseburg where I live we’ve mostly just been experiencing a lot of rain. Even still, I’ve experienced sporadic power outages and internet outages for the past few days.

Hopefully, the weather will hold for long enough to finish and submit my assignments for the week.