2008 Ad Hoc Developers Meeting Minutes
Meeting Minutes from the 2008 Ad Hoc Developers Meeting
Date: October 7, 2008 Place: Chapel Hill, NC
Meeting facilitated by Zac Adelman (UNC). Meeting started with introductions, who is in attendance, what are you doing, and what interests you in being involved in the ad hoc developers meeting. Questions that we would like to discuss:
- what do the developers need from CMAS?
- what does CMAS need from the developers?
- developers code archive vs. tar ball/CVS distribution
Many of the attendees expressed the need for better documentation about CMAQ, particularly technical documentation. There is interest in having cross-references to scientific papers and technical presentations in documentation about the model science.
Free data availability is something that members of the community would like to see.
Linkages to other development activities should be maintained through the CMAS
Online educational materials that explain to students what AQM's can and cannot do.
A utility like a code browser would be helpful (see wrfbrowser). Software engineering tools to help understand the CMAQ codes would be helpful.
CMAS needs to establish a formal process for distributing patches for the code.
Maintaining a frequently asked questions area would benefit the community
The development community needs an information clearinghouse for model documentation, other developments, and discussion threads about development
How can CMAS engage the community to develop on the models. The code structure is difficult to follow. There is a need for enforcing true modularity in the CMAQ code. Object oriented CMAQ. Modularity will help drive more development. A reason that the code is so dynamic is that changing computational architectures has made the code a moving target. Modularity doesn't mean that the code needs to be overstructured.
Performance improvements could be made by moving primitive variables into include files. There are currently uncentralized constants that make the code difficult to read.
There was also interest in a better forum for communication than the listservs. The idea of a Wiki was proposed by a few different people.
Immediate needs/deliverables:
- Ideas repository that includes possible code issues and problems
- code wishlist, what would you like to see happen in CMAQ
- development wishlist, what needs to be worked on now
- community activities, what are others doing for development work in the community
