Marvin Zelkowitz

In order to understand how high performance computing (HPC) programs are developed, a series of experiments, using students in graduate level HPC classes and various research centers, were conducted at various locations in the US. In this report, we discuss this research, give some of the early results of those experiments, and describe a web-based Experiment Manager we are developing that allows us to run studies more easily and consistently at universities and laboratories, allowing us to generate results that more accurately reflect the process of building HPC programs.

This report summarizes the activities during the period May 1, 1991 through June 30, 1992. The following three sections describe results from three major activities; a risk-based model of software decision making, construction of models for software development processes, and verification of safety properties of software requirements specifications.

The projects presented in this report encompass developing and integrating the concepts and models used in the TAME measurement environment, using syntax-editing technology to develop formal specifications, investigating the impact of functional specification and development on software construction, designing and evaluating a new exception handling mechanism, and transforming computations for single processors to execute efficiently on non-shared memory multiprocessors. (emk)