Session 21: Databases and Software Engineering

The twenty-first session of the LSST Discovery Alliance DSFP was hosted by the Center for Astrophysical Surveys and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The curriculum focuses on Software Engineering and Databases.

The guest instructors for S21 were:

Dr. Scotty Coughlin, Northwestern University Dr. Lehman Garrison, Scientific Computing Core, Flatiron Institute
Olivia Lynn, LINCC Frameworks, Carnegie Mellon University
Dr. Veronica Dike, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Additional lectures were given by the DSFP leadership team:

Dr. Bryan Scott
Dr. Adam Miller

Schedule

Day 1 – Introduction to Software Engineering

"Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases."

~ Norman Ralph Augustine

Monday, March 25, 2024

Data for day one exercises is available here.

09:00 AM – 09:30 AM o Introduction of Guest Instructors and Code of Conduct Conversation
09:30 AM - 10:30 AM o Lecture I Introduction to Software Engineering and Repositories; B. Scott
10:30 AM – 11:00 AM o BREAK
11:00 AM – 12:00 PM o Problem I Software Repositories
12:00 PM – 01:30 PM o LUNCH
01:30 PM – 01:45 PM o Lecture II Data Wrangling; B. Scott
01:45 PM – 03:00 PM o Problem II Data Wrangling; B. Scott
03:00 PM – 03:30 PM o BREAK
03:30 PM - 04:30 PM o Lecture III – Objectively Good: Intro to OOP; O. Lynn
04:30 PM - 05:30 PM o Problem III – Problem: OOP; O. Lynn

Day 2 – Databases

"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

~ Charles Babbage

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

09:00 PM – 09:15 AM o Lecture IV This Laptop is Inadquate & Introduction to Data Organization; B. Scott
09:15 PM – 10:30 AM o Problem IV Introduction to Data Organization; B. Scott
10:30 AM – 11:00 AM o BREAK
11:00 AM – 12:00 PM o Lecture V – Databases, SQL, and Django; S. Coughlin
12:00 AM - 01:30 PM o LUNCH
01:30 PM – 03:00 PM Problem V – Problem: SQL servers and database queries; S. Coughlin
03:00 PM – 04:00 PM o Lecture VI – NoSQL databases: MongoDB; S. Coughlin
04:00 PM - 04:30 PM o BREAK
04:30 PM – 06:00 PM o Problem VI – NoSQL queries; S. Coughlin

Day 3 — Software Development

"To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge."

~ Grace Hopper

~ Wednesday, March 27, 2024

09:00 AM - 10:00 AM o Lecture VII Problem: OOP; O. Lynn
10:00 AM - 10:30 AM o BREAK
10:30 AM - 12:00 PM o Problem VII OOP; O. Lynn
12:00 PM - ??:?? PM o BREAK

Visit and Tour of NCSA

Day 4 — Continuous Integration, Documentation, Parallelism, and High Performance Computing

"That, if a straight line falling on two straight lines make the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if produced indefinitely, meet on that side on which are the angles less than the two right angles."

~ Euclid

Thursday, March 28, 2024

09:00 AM – 10:00 AM o Lecture VIII: Endgame Essentials: CI, Docs, and Everything in Between; O. Lynn
10:00 AM – 10:30 AM o BREAK
10:30 AM – 12:00 PM o Problem VIII Endgame Essentials; O. Lynn
12:00 PM – 01:30 PM o LUNCH
01:30 PM – 02:30 PM o Lecture IX: High-Performance Python and Parallelization; L. Garrison
02:30 PM – 04:00 PM o Problem IX: High-Performance Python and Parallelization; L. Garrison
04:00 PM – 04:30 PM o BREAK
04:30 PM – 05:00 PM o Hack Pitch Session
06:30 PM - ??:?? PM o Group Dinner:

Day 5 — GPU Accelerated Computing and Hack Session

"It takes four hundred thirty people to man a starship. With this, you don't need anyone. One machine can do all those things they send men out to do now. Men no longer need die in space, or on some alien world. Men can live, and go on to achieve greater things than fact-finding and dying for galactic space, which is neither ours to give or to take. Can't understand. We don't want to destroy life, we want to save it."

~ Dr. Richard Daystrom, Star Trek TOS: The Ultimate Computer

Friday, March 29, 2024

9:00 AM - 10:00 AM o Lecture X: GPU-Accelerated Python; L. Garrison
10:00 AM - 10:30 AM o BREAK
10:30 AM – 12:00 PM o Problem X: GPU-Accelerated Python; L. Garrison
12:00 PM – 01:30 PM o LUNCH
01:30 PM – 04:30 PM o Hack Session;
04:30 PM – 05:00 PM o Hack Session Results, Summary of Software Engineering + Databases, and Farewell to Cohort 6

nmearl / Session-21