Colin C. Venters

Sustainability design and software: the karlskrona manifesto

Sustainability has emerged as a broad concern for society. Many engineering disciplines have been grappling with challenges in how we sustain technical, social and ecological systems. In the software engineering community, for example, maintainability has been a concern for a long time. But too often, these issues are treated in isolation from one another. Misperceptions among practitioners and research communities persist, rooted in a lack of coherent understanding of sustainability, and how it relates to software systems research and practice. This article presents a cross-disciplinary initiative to create a common ground and a point of reference for the global community of research and practice in software and sustainability, to be used for effectively communicating key issues, goals, values and principles of sustainability design for software-intensive systems.The centrepiece of this effort is the Karlskrona Manifesto for Sustainability Design, a vehicle for a much needed conversation about sustainability within and beyond the software community, and an articulation of the fundamental principles underpinning design choices that affect sustainability. We describe the motivation for developing this manifesto, including some considerations of the genre of the manifesto as well as the dynamics of its creation. We illustrate the collaborative reflective writing process and present the current edition of the manifesto itself. We assess immediate implications and applications of the articulated principles, compare these to current practice, and suggest future steps.

Requirements: The Key to Sustainability

Softwares critical role in society demands a paradigm shift in the software engineering mind-set. This shifts focus begins in requirements engineering. This article is part of a special issue on the Future of Software Engineering.

Summary of the First Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE1)

Challenges related to development, deployment, and maintenance of reusable software for science are becoming a growing concern. Many scientists’ research increasingly depends on the quality and availability of software upon which their works are built. To highlight some of these issues and share experiences, the First Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE1) was held in November 2013 in conjunction with the SC13 Conference. The workshop featured keynote presentations and a large number (54) of solicited extended abstracts that were grouped into three themes and presented via panels. A set of collaborative notes of the presentations and discussion was taken during the workshop. Unique perspectives were captured about issues such as comprehensive documentation, development and deployment practices, software licenses and career paths for developers. Attribution systems that account for evidence of software contribution and impact were also discussed. These include mechanisms such as Digital Object Identifiers, publication of “software papers”, and the use of online systems, for example source code repositories like GitHub. This paper summarizes the issues and shared experiences that were discussed, including cross-cutting issues and use cases. It joins a nascent literature seeking to understand what drives software work in science, and how it is impacted by the reward systems of science. These incentives can determine the extent to which developers are motivated to build software for the long-term, for the use of others, and whether to work collaboratively or separately. It also explores community building, leadership, and dynamics in relation to successful scientific software.

Sustainability design in requirements engineering: state of practice

Sustainability is now a major concern in society, but there is little understanding of how it is perceived by software engineering professionals and how sustainability design can become an embedded part of software engineering process. This paper presents the results of a qualitative study exploring requirements engineering practitioners’ perceptions and attitudes towards sustainability. It identifies obstacles and mitigation strategies regarding the application of sustainability design principlesin daily work life. The results of this study reveal several factors that can prevent sustainability design from becoming a first class citizen in software engineering: software practitioners tend to have a narrow understanding of the concept of sustainability; organizations show limited awareness of its potential opportunities and benefits; and the norms in the discipline are not conducive to sustainable outcomes. These findings suggest the need for focused efforts in sustainability education, but also a need to rethink professional norms and practices.

Report on the Third Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE3).

This report records and discusses the Third Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE3). The report includes a description of the keynote presentation of the workshop, which served as an overview of sustainable scientific software. It also summarizes a set of lightning talks in which speakers highlighted to-the-point lessons and challenges pertaining to sustaining scientific software. The final and main contribution of the report is a summary of the discussions, future steps, and future organization for a set of self-organized working groups on topics including developing pathways to funding scientific software; constructing useful common metrics for crediting software stakeholders; identifying principles for sustainable software engineering design; reaching out to research software organizations around the world; and building communities for software sustainability. For each group, we include a point of contact and a landing page that can be used by those who want to join that group’s future activities. The main challenge left by the workshop is to see if the groups will execute these activities that they have scheduled, and how the WSSSPE community can encourage this to happen.

Orchestrating Docker Containers in the HPC Environment

Linux container technology has more than proved itself useful in cloud computing as a lightweight alternative to virtualisation, whilst still offering good enough resource isolation. Docker is emerging as a popular runtime for managing Linux containers, providing both management tools and a simple file format. Research into the performance of containers compared to traditional Virtual Machines and bare metal shows that containers can achieve near native speeds in processing, memory and network throughput. A technology born in the cloud, it is making inroads into scientific computing both as a format for sharing experimental applications and as a paradigm for cloud based execution. However, it has unexplored uses in traditional cluster and grid computing. It provides a run time environment in which there is an opportunity for typical cluster and parallel applications to execute at native speeds, whilst being bundled with their own specific (or legacy) library versions and support software. This offers a solution to the Achilles heel of cluster and grid computing that requires the user to hold intimate knowledge of the local software infrastructure. Using Docker brings us a step closer to more effective job and resource management within the cluster by providing both a common definition format and a repeatable execution environment. In this paper we present the results of our work in deploying Docker containers in the cluster environment and an evaluation of its suitability as a runtime for high performance parallel execution. Our findings suggest that containers can be used to tailor the run time environment for an MPI application without compromising performance, and would provide better Quality of Service for users of scientific computing.

Software sustainability: Research and practice from a software architecture viewpoint

Part of this work is supported by the Brazilian funding agency FAPESP (Grant: 2017/06195- 9), and the Canadian NSERC through RGPIN2016-06640.

Everything is INTERRELATED: teaching software engineering for sustainability

Sustainability has become an important concern across many disciplines, and software systems play an increasingly central role in addressing it. However, teaching students from software engineering and related disciplines to effectively act in this space requires interdisciplinary courses that combines the concept of sustainability with software engineering practice and principles. Yet, presently little guidance exist on which subjects and materials to cover in such courses and how, combined with a lack of reusable learning objects. This paper describes a summer school course on Software Engineering for Sustainability (SE4S). We provide a blueprint for this course, in the hope that it can help the community develop a shared approach and methods to teaching SE4S. Practical lessons learned from delivery of this course are also reported here, and could help iterate over the course materials, structure, and guidance for future improvements. The course blueprint, availability of used materials and report of the study results make this course viable for replication and further improvement.

Securing user defined containers for scientific computing

Linux containers and Docker have gained immense popularity as a lightweight alternative to hypervisor based Virtual Machines (VMs). In the context of High Performance Computing and the scientific community, it is clear that containers can serve many useful purposes from system administration, to improved cluster resource management and as a format for sharing reproducible research. However, when compared to VMs, containers seem to trade isolation for performance and ease of use, which poses unique security challenges. In this paper we review how Docker is being used in science, highlight easy to perform exploits, and evaluate the impact of these on HPC deployments. We also summarise a number of strategies for hardening such a system to reduce the vulnerability of hosting User Defined Containers. Based on these, an original solution to enforce default options and container ownership for nonadministrative users in the HPC use case is presented, in addition to the experience of implementing such a system on a cluster at the University of Huddersfield.

Autonomous Discovery and Management in Virtual Container Clusters

Global software stacks on scientific cluster computing resources are required to provide a homogeneous software environment which is typically inflexible. Efforts to integrate Virtual Machines (VMs), in order to abstract the software environment of various scientific applications, suffer from performance limitations and require systems administration expertise to maintain. However, the motivation is clear; in addition to increasing resource utilization, the burden of supporting new software installations on existing systems can be reduced. In this paper, we introduce the Virtual Container Cluster (VCC) that encapsulates a typical HPC software environment within Docker containers. The novel component cluster–watcher enables context aware discovery and configuration of the virtual cluster. Containers offer a lightweight alternative to VMs that more closely match the native performance, and presents a solution that is more accessible to customization by the average user. Combined with a Software Defined Networking (SDN) technology, the VCC enables dynamic features such as transparent scaling and spanning across multiple physical resources. Although SDN introduces an additional performance limitation, within the context of a parallel communication network, the benchmarking demonstrates that this cost is application dependent. The Linpack benchmarking shows that the overhead of container virtualization and SDN interconnect is comparable to the native performance.