Title: Software engineering meets scientific computing: group projects in CSE education

Authors: M. Bader, H-J. Bungartz, I.L. Muntean, T. Neckel

Addresses: Department of Informatics, Technische Universitat Munchen, Germany. ' Department of Informatics, Technische Universitat Munchen, Germany. ' Department of Informatics, Technische Universitat Munchen, Germany. ' Department of Informatics, Technische Universitat Munchen, Germany

Abstract: In addition to the well-established bottlenecks in scientific computing – hardware and algorithms – CSE currently witnesses a new one: the software. A change in the philosophy of developing simulation programs towards systematic software engineering is painfully required. To help the coming generation of CSE researchers acquire practical skills in software engineering, we extended our CSE master program|s curriculum by a structured group software development project as part of a respective honours program. We present results and evaluate the success of this concept for several projects in diverse CSE areas, in particular for two recent projects in fluid-structure interaction and molecular dynamics.

Keywords: CSE education; software engineering; group projects; FSI; fluid-structure interaction; molecular dynamics; simulation; computational science and engineering.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2009.029161

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2009 Vol.4 No.4, pp.245 - 253

Published online: 08 Nov 2009 *

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