Tobias Schlauch

A data management system for UNICORE 6

Data produced in scientific and industrial applications is growing exponentially but most resource middleware systems lack of appropriate support for data and metadata management. In particular easy and intuitive retrieval of data for later use is a serious problem. In this context the paper proposes a pragmatic approach for data management of distributed data with focus on appropriate means for data organization improving data retrieval. The paper presents the key concepts and architecture of a dedicated data management system for sharing data located on heterogeneous storage resources. The different specifics of storage systems such as data object names, data locations, and data access methods are abstracted to allow transparent data access. Moreover, the system provides means for data structuring and organization by supporting custom data models and annotation of individual metadata on data objects. Current development status of the system is illustrated by presenting an integration with the UNICORE Rich Client which has been validated in the context of the AeroGrid project.

An Open Source Software Directory for Aeronautics and Space

In aerospace engineering, as well as in many other disciplines, many software tools are developed. Often, it is hard to get an overview of already existing software. Sometimes this leads to multiple development of software, if nobody is able to determine whether a software for a specific tasks exist already or not. Therefore, in companies and organizations there is a need for a directory of exiting software. The German Aerospace Center has built such a directory based on the Open Source software Allura, which is the base software that drives the Open Source hosting platform SourceForge.net. Allura has been customized to the needs of the aerospace domain. The result is a software portal for the aerospace research community, that allow to register and categorize software. It is intendend to be used both for Open Source and proprietary software. Employees of the German Aerospace Center as well as the public can search for existing software. This reduces the amount of software developed twice and allows to get in touch with colleagues who developed similar software.

Software Engineering Guidelines - From Theory to Practice

Research software is mainly developed by scientists who are domain experts. Most of them have no specific education in software development. To support research scientists at the German Aerospace Center, we created a set of software engineering guidelines for different fields of software development. At RSE17, we already presented the concept of the guidelines. This time, we want to share the practical experiences we collected over the last year. In this talk, we want to practically introduce the guidelines and the classification scheme. Particularly, we demonstrate their usage in context of two real-world research software applications. The first example demonstrates the usage of the guidelines when starting a new software development. In this case the focus is on finding the initial steps and getting an overview of future aspects. The second example is about an existing, legacy software application. In this case the focus is on analyzing what is already there and finding out the next suitable steps. In this context, the accompanying checklists function as an ongoing planning document and the classification scheme helps to find the suitable starting point.

The software engineering initiative of DLR: overcome the obstacles and develop sustainable software

Software is a vital part of modern research. The competence to develop sustainable software becomes increasingly important for research organizations. The DLR - a large research organization in Germany - has set up a software engineering initiative to address typical obstacles in this regard such as missing long-term funding, lack of incentives, or missing knowledge about essential software development practices. In this paper, we describe the concept and activities of the initiative as well as discuss the impact of these activities on the identified obstacles.