[MODEST] MODEST-6b meeting in Princeton, Sept. 15-16, 2005

[Piet Hut]

Dear MODEST colleagues:

We will organize a two-day MODEST satellite workshop on

   Black Magic & White Elephants:
   Performance and Transparency in
   Computational Stellar Dynamics

on
   September 15-16, 10am - 5pm
at
   the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, USA

See the MODEST web site, or go directly
to
   http://www.manybody.org/modest/Workshops/modest-6b.html

As usual with MODEST meetings: everything will be very
informal, mostly just rounds of discussions.  Here is a
short summary, from the above web page:

The two main topics of this workshop are the ways to implement
performance enhancement of existing and future codes, and ways
to increase understandability and hence extendibility of these
codes.  Performance can be defined as the amount of physical
time that can be modeled with a given amount of CPU time, at
a given accuracy.  Therefore, we will discuss many different
ways of performance increase: from faster hardware to better
parallellization algorithms to better long-term accuracy of
algorithms to ways of improving memory management on single CPUs.
Transparency, or understandability, of codes will be discussed
by comparing various documentation strategies, beginning with
Knuth's concept of literate programming, that most recently
been exemplified by James Quirk's Amrita environment has
on
    http://www.amrita-cfd.org/cgi-bin/doc/drink-me

Note: the dictionnary definition of "white elephant" is:
a valuable possession whose upkeep is excessively expensive.

The meeting is open to all who are interested, but please do send an
email to me if you would like to attend, so that we can add your name
on the list of participants.  In addition, if we know how many people
to expect, we will be able to reserve a room of the appropriate size.

Looking forward to seeing you in Princeton in three months,

Piet