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CppCon 2016: Turning Particle-Astro-Physicist-Hackers into Software Engineers--Alex Olivas

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 11, 2017 03:18 PM | Tags: efficiency community

Have you registered for CppCon 2017 in September? Don’t delay – Registration is open now.

While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2016 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Turning Particle-Astro-Physicist-Hackers into Software Engineers

by Alex Olivas

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Want to increase software literacy in your organization? In this talk I'll present programs I've developed over the last year to teach C++ software engineering principles to graduate students and postdocs on the IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory. I believe similar programs could be beneficial to all types of organizations, from scientific collaborations to professional software shops.

IceCube is a kilometer-scale high energy neutrino observatory located deep in the Antarctic ice at the geographic South Pole. IceCube studies physics in energy regimes ranging from the most energetic processes in the visible universe (several orders of magnitude greater than the collision energies at the Large Hadron Collider), to dark matter detection at the 100 GeV scale. It is a relatively large collaboration, consisting of roughly 300 physicists and engineers from 48 institutions from a dozen different countries. IceCube has been collecting data for over 11 years (going into our 6th season with the fully completed detector) and is expected to run for at least another decade.

Many large scientific projects, which often run for decades, rely on code developed by hackers, who's focus and passion is rarely software engineering. Their primary passion, understandably, is the field for which they found themselves writing code. To make matters worse, the amount of work and focus required to secure a career in their chosen field often leaves little time and energy to devote to honing the skills needed to develop production quality code. Many students and postdocs often have, at best, a cursory understanding of the programming language(s) that comprise the experiment's codebase.

C++ has become the primary programming language for High Energy Physics (HEP) and will likely continue to be for decades to come. Consider, for example, that ROOT, GEANT, and Pythia to name a few critical HEP libraries are written in C++. Over the last year on IceCube, I've developed several comprehensive internal training programs in an attempt to bridge the gap between the scientist-hacker and the professional C++ software engineer. In this session I'd like to present the challenges I've encountered over the last year and my plans for extending these programs to the High Energy Physics community through the HEP Software Foundation.

The reviews at r/cpp_review have begun!

By Meeting C++ | Aug 10, 2017 08:12 AM | Tags: performance intermediate efficiency community codereview c++14 c++11 basics

Participate in the first two reviews at r/cpp_review:

The reviews have begun

by Jens Weller

From the article

A few weeks ago I announced a C++ review community, which since then has grown to 250+ members on reddit. There has been great feedback and discussions since then, so that the idea is now ready to be tested.  With August, the first review period has started

CppCon 2016: Asynchronous IO with Boost.Asio--Michael Caisse

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 9, 2017 12:48 PM | Tags: efficiency community

Have you registered for CppCon 2017 in September? Don’t delay – Registration is open now.

While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2016 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Asynchronous IO with Boost.Asio

by Michael Caisse

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Reactive systems are found everywhere. The temptation to implement them with legions of waiting threads can be strong; however, the result is nearly always disappointing. The Boost.Asio library provides a framework to handle asynchronous resources with specific classes directed toward networking, serial port I/O, timers and more. In this session we will introduce Asio and some best practices while implementing a simple TCP client and server.

Asio has been submitted to the C++ Standards Committee for inclusion and can be found in the Boost library collection or as a stand-alone version. Come and learn a better way to implement reactive systems with the Asynchronous I/O library.

Qt talks at CppCon 2017--Giuseppe D'Angelo

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 7, 2017 03:41 PM | Tags: community

It's getting closer.

Qt talks at CppCon 2017

by Giuseppe D'Angelo

From the article:

The program for CppCon 2017 is now published!

CppCon is the annual conference for the C++ community: five days packed with over 100 talks, as well as inspiring keynotes, panel discussions, hallway chats, fun evening events and much more. CppCon is a project of the Standard C++ Foundation, a not-for-profit organization whose purpose is to support the C++ software developer community and promote the understanding and use of modern, standard C++ on all compilers and platforms.

CppCon 2016: The Blaze High Performance Math Library--Klaus Iglberger

By Adrien Hamelin | Aug 7, 2017 03:24 PM | Tags: performance community

Have you registered for CppCon 2017 in September? Don’t delay – Registration is open now.

While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2016 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

The Blaze High Performance Math Library

by Klaus Iglberger

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

In this presentation we introduce the Blaze C++ math library, a hot contender for the linear algebra performance throne. Blaze is an open-source, high-performance library for dense and sparse arithmetic. It combines elegance and ease of use with HPC-grade performance, making it one of the most intuitive and at the same time fastest C++ math libraries available.

We demonstrate its basic linear algebra functionality by means of several BLAS level 1 to 3 operations and explain why Blaze outperforms even well established linear algebra libraries. Additionally, we present some advanced features that enable users to adapt Blaze to special circumstances: custom data structures, custom operations, and the customizable error reporting mechanism.