HPC Software Quality

Preamble

Software for HPC/Scientific Computing comes with lots of bells and whistles and, often requires customization at many levels in order to become available as service. Developers/providers of related software are not always aware of the challenges inherent in delivering the software as a service and this is a chance to communicate such needs via weighting the software quality, as regards the installation aspects.

Criteria

• relocatable: ability to freely choose the delivery path within the system
• generality: make as few assumptions about the relying system as possible (fi. compiler rpm/deb)
• buildable bundles: use of configure or cmake style installation mechanisms, wherever applicable
• orthogonality: do not hard-wire versions of software dependencies (incl. scripting languages etc)
• non-collission: should allow two installers to run in parallel freely (eg. avoid /tmp/extractdir)
• documentation: provide a quickstart style of guide for who care little about inners of the installer
• tidy builds: do not leave unnecessary left-over files or change permissions in $HOME, pwd etc
• testable: provide test/validation suites for the delivered build
• standards aware: Follow wisely language (fi. C90) or implementation (fi. IEEE754) standards
• overrideable defaults: as says, avoid hardwired parameters

other traits:

• be consistent in version number announced and published via the binary
• avoid rewriting the same version number twice, for fixing bugs making changes etc - no matter how trivial

References

• http://starplot.org/articles/physics-software-rant.html
• http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uccaiki/iki-softrant.pdf
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Sustainability_Institute