Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Tech Transfer
Fortran Testing and Refactoring Infrastructure, Phase I
Project Description
Tech-X proposes to develop a comprehensive Fortran testing and refactoring infrastructure that allows developers and scientists to leverage the benefits of a comprehensive Integrated Developer Environment (IDE). An intriguing aspect of the infrastructure is the integration of performance measurement and monitoring from within the IDE that allows developers to get immediate feedback about tests, the overall application and modifications due to refactoring. Our goal isto promote modern software engineering methodology to a broad spectrum ofFortran users. The infrastructure will facilitate refactoring newly developed and legacy codes correctly and accurately for single and multi-processor applications and will provide facility for both unit and regression testing. Major benefits to refactoring include creating robust codes that are more easily ported to different hardware and software platforms and promoting extensibility and collaboration. For example, refactoring code to remove common blocks allows porting to multi-core architectures with increased thread safety while promoting best software engineering practices. By leveraging the existing capabilities of pFUnit (an xUnit variant that supports Fortran) and Photran (a Fortran Integrated Development Environment and Eclipse plugin) we will be able to quickly contribute to the Fortrandeveloper community, whos feedback we hope to use to guide our product development.
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Anticipated Benefits
There are a large number of non-Nasa related applications written in Fortran that could benefit from our Fortran testing and refactoring framework. One application we will work closely with is the Community Climate System Model/Community Atmosphere Model (CCSM/CAM) developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The land, ocean and ice models that are a part of the CCSM can also benefit. Other Fortran codes that might benefit include those that are related to the SciDAC FACETS project (that http://www.scidac.gov/fusion/fullscale.html). NASTRAN variants, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), combustion and geophysical data processing codes written in Fortran may benefit from our work regardless of whether they are commercial or academic ventures. The Fortran developer community at large will benefit by being able to use improved mechanisms that have been available for some time to the C and C++ communities to test and refactor Fortran codes which will result in more robust, scalable and extensible codes. Potential NASA applications include those supported by NASA high-end computing (HEC) and the Modeling, Analysis and Prediction (MAP) programs. Our specific Phase 1 target is the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies coupled atmosphere-ocean model, modelE (http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/). Other potential use codes are the Goddard Cumulus Ensemble model (http://atmospheres.gsfc.nasa.gov/cloud_modeling /models_gce.html), the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office(GMAO) GEOS-4 (http://gmao.gsfc.nasa.gov/systems/geos4/) and GEOS-5 models (http://gmao.gsfc.nasa.gov/systems/geos5/) and the GEOS-Chem model for atmospheric composition (http://map.nasa.gov/GEOS_CHEM.html). Ultimately, The Fortran testing and refactoring infrastructure can be used with all software engineering projects written in FORTAN 77, Fortran90, Fortran95 and Fortran2003. In out-year tasks we will also support codes that are written in combinations of Fortran and C, C++ and Python.
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Primary U.S. Work Locations and Key Partners
| Organizations Performing Work | Role | Type | Location |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tech-X Corporation | Lead Organization | Industry | Boulder, Colorado |
Goddard Space Flight Center
(GSFC)
|
Supporting Organization | NASA Center | Greenbelt, Maryland |
Primary U.S. Work Locations
-
Colorado
-
Maryland
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This is a historic project that was completed before the creation of TechPort on October 1, 2012. Available data has been included. This record may contain less data than currently active projects.