Past and current works on DIRAC development

This web-page lists various projects for the development of the DIRAC software. It is mainly the collection of finished, on-going and proposed bachelor and master thesis projects for (mainly) IT-students, plus general wishlist.

IT-students at universities around the world have potential to contribute to the DIRAC development. For them, one has specify suitable “IT-only” projects around DIRAC, without need of deep knowledge of relativistic quantum chemical methods.

We, the DIRAC developers, are kindly invited to share our ideas about possible themes here. Each proposed project should have short desciption (annotation), author (supervisor) and assigned student if any.

Thesis list

Comparison of CPU and GPU mathematical libraries

The aim of this thesis is to compare the speed of some numerical procedures from CUBLAS and CULA libraries with their Fotran analogues BLAS and LAPACK libraries. We wrote a short working program (in utils/gpu_test.F90) in Fortran and C which compares the time complexity for various input parameters (matrix, vector sizes etc). The usefullness of this student project is in possible application of CUBLAS / CULA library functions in the entire DIRAC program suite. (Finished in summer 2012, student D.Kuzma, supervised by Miro Ilias.)

CMake platform universal system for the software buildup

First, learn the CMake buildup system on simple testing programs written in C,C++,Fortran languages. Later, try to program more complex CMake buildup receipes, including macros. Assigned student I.Hrasko. Miro Ilias was supervising, Rado Bast was the referee. This bachelor project was finished in summer 2013.

Documentation generator Sphinx and its usage for DIRAC

The Sphinx documentation system, based upon Python language, has great potential for creating and easy maintaining the on-line documentation. This is clearly demonstrated on the DIRAC documentation. However, there is place for various improvements in the documentation framework. The assigned IT-student (Juraj Bubniak, supervised by Miro Ilias) is expected to polish the bibliography (for instance, better formatted table of references would fit), math equations (export in various formats), add social networks ‘like’-buttons etc. Student’s master thesis defense is expected in summer 2015.

Adpatation of DIRAC for Microsoft Windows and high-performace computing

We need to adapt DIRAC thorougly for the MS Windows operating system and enable high-performace computing also on this (commertial) operating system. Assigned and currently working student is Ivan Hrasko, who gained rich experience with CMake in his bachelor project (Miro Ilias supervising). His master project is to be finished in summer 2015.

IT-aspects of grid-computations with DIRAC

Complex adaptation of DIRAC for computing in the grid environment. Create set of universal, low-level scripts (bash), handling the DIRAC suite calculations on unknown grid computing elements. Supervisor Miro Ilias is currently looking for an IT-student.

Testing various compilers and mathematical libraries for DIRAC

It is known that selection of compilers, their flags and mathematical libraries has influence on the code’s time performance. For DIRAC, the aim is to employ variours compilers (GNU, Intel, Portland), available libraries (MKL, ACML, ATLAS, netlib) for the time performance measurements. We hope to select set of compiler flags and suitable libraries giving the best execution timing. Supervisor Miro Ilias got an IT-student for bachelor thesis, hopefully he will start the work from autumn 2014.

Git and web-based project development platforms in the service of DIRAC

The Git version control system is very popular for the code development. On top of it, various web-based project development platforms (like assembla, bitbucket, deveo, gitorious etc) are heplful for managing git repositories and controling the program development. The aim is to describe (in the form of manual) the Git system and available project development web-servers. We investigate various features and show how all these goodies can be applied for the collaborative DIRAC development. This project is suitable for bachelor thesis.

Doxygen code documentation for DIRAC

The Doxygen is popular and free code documentation generator. It works for many programming languages, including C, C++ and Fortran. Our aim is to adapt DIRAC code description comments for the Doxygen, and, eventually, the Doxygen source code as well in order to get properly generated documentation of all Fortran, C and C++ DIRAC source files. This theme is suitable for one or more IT-students.

Other ideas

New input reader with documenting of keywords

Let us write/use an keyword input reader which requires keywords to have some documentation. Otherwise the code won’t even compile. Then the “make html” command would go through the source code and generate the RST files which would exactly reflect the state of the code (unless of course somebody changes the keyword without changing the text 2 lines below but we could introduce some punishment for it).