SBIR/STTR
Fortran Testing and Refactoring Infrastructure, Phase II
Project Introduction
Tech-X proposes to develop a comprehensive Fortran testing and refactoring infrastructure that allows developers and scientists to leverage the benefits of comprehensive Integrated Developer Environment (IDE) tools. An intriguing aspect of the infrastructure is the integration of performance measurement, unit testing, and refactoring tools with the many other features of an IDE, which will allow developers to get immediate feedback about the overall application and reduce their development cycle time. Our goal is to promote modern software engineering methodology to a broad spectrum of Fortran users. The infrastructure will facilitate refactoring newly developed and legacy codes correctly and accurately for single and multi-processor applications. Major benefits to refactoring include creating robust codes that are more easily ported to different hardware and software platforms, promoting extensibility, facilitating better collaboration, and encouraging best software engineering practices. For example, refactoring code to remove common blocks allows porting to multi-core architectures with increased thread safety. By packaging pFUnit (Fortran Unit Test Tool) into the Eclipse, combining with improved versions of Photran IDE and the Parallel Tools Platform plugins, the proposed integration we will be able to quickly contribute to the Fortran developer community, whose feedback we hope to use to guide our product development.
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Anticipated Benefits
Ultimately, The Fortran testing and refactoring infrastructure can be used with all software engineering projects written in FORTAN 77, Fortran90, Fortran95 and Fortran2003. Consequently, there are a large number of non-Nasa related applications written in Fortran that could benefit from our Fortran testing and refactoring framework. 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. More specifically, the proposing firm is fortunate to be co-located with the Climate and Global Dynamics Division (CGD) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who is administrating the Community Earth System Model (CESM). CESM is a fully-coupled, global climate model that provides state-of-the-art computer simulations of the Earth's past, present, and future climate states supported by NSF and DOE. The firm is also leading the DOE SciDAC project, FACETS, to integrate fusion codes some of which are Fortran codes which would benefit from the proposed tools. 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. We plan to work closely with the team developing the Photran Eclipse Plugin to have the broadest impact.
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Primary U.S. Work Locations and Key Partners
| Organizations Performing Work | Role | Type | Location |
|---|---|---|---|
Goddard Space Flight Center
(GSFC)
|
Lead Organization | NASA Center | Greenbelt, MD |
| Tech-X Corporation | Supporting Organization | Industry | Boulder, CO |
Primary U.S. Work Locations
-
Colorado
-
Maryland
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Organizational Responsibility
Responsible Mission Directorate:
- Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD)
Lead Center / Facility:
- Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC)
Responsible Program:
- SBIR/STTR
Project Management
Program Director:
Program Manager:
Project Managers:
Principal Investigator:
- David A Alexander
Project Duration
Start: Jun 2011
End: May 2014
Technology Maturity (TRL)
| Start: | 4 |
| Current: | 2 |
| Estimated End: | 8 |
Applied Research
Development
Demo & Test
Technology Areas
Primary:
- TA 11 Modeling, Simulation, Information Technology and Processing
- TA 11.2 Modeling
- TA 11.2.5 Frameworks, Languages, Tools, and Standards