Technical Approach

Rocstar Multiphysics Application

Technical approach for Phase I

Illinois Rocstar conducts projects according to an Agile/Lean project management philosophy. All work is planned and estimated iteratively and with the participation of the project development team. Development iterations (i.e., sprints) are conducted in 2-week blocks during which the team works on completing several backlog items. Backlog items are each a packaged set of work tasks which, when complete, increment the project along its project roadmap. These project management, roadmap, and progress artifacts will be publicly visible throughout the lifetime of the Rocstar application.

The overarching technical objectives for Phase I of this project are to establish a customer-facing development program for Rocstar, improve usability, and prepare the code base for extensive changes in Phases II and III. Careful planning and laying down the groundwork during Phase I will be extremely important to the success of the Phase II effort. The specific technical objectives for Phase I are as follows:

1. Establish customer-facing development/deployment: Careful planning and proper establishment of public user-facing facilities is needed in Phase I. A customer-facing development program means establishing automated and packaged testing, issue and feature tracking facilities, a strategy for HPC-friendly distribution packages, a public source repository, a software life-cycle model, and adequate user and developer documentation.
2. Harden runtime systems: Rocstar usability will be improved by improving the standard I/O (i.e., screen and log I/O), developing a runtime monitoring facility, and providing a substrate for the runtime dashboard. Improvements will also be made in Rocstar error reporting.
3. Ready code for Computational Model Builder: The Rocstar preprocessing tool chain will be overhauled for readiness of integration with the Computational Model Builder. This step should vastly improve usability through hardening the dataset preparation procedures.

---

Navigation links

Rocstar components
Licensing
Goals
Members
Technical
Implementation
Example Problems
Related Work
Reading and References
Rocstar Funding