Research Work Issues

// March 24th, 2009 // Announcement

I had a freaking break down today. There are just so many things going on with research and at times can feel very over whelming. I took this day off to get a hold of myself and to reorganize my current attack plan. Things on my list that have to be done for research include:

Thesis write up
muse benchmarking
muse website

My issue today was with testing. Ignoring the fact that I am not a c++ expert (in my opinion the shear complexities of c++ requires many years of development to master, and the word expert should not be used to lightly), dealing with code that runs in parallel is just a pain the a**. There is no easy way to test, no easy way to unit test. When a bug is discovered, well, good luck because hunting that bug down will consume valuable time. I have managed to make good progress on the muse website musesimulation.org. However my work on the thesis writeup has been at a stand still for the last week and a half because I have been developing simulations for my benchmarking.

Benchmarking is a whole other ball game. I found the best way to find bugs in the kernel is to create different types of simulations and see if they work. Everytime I create a benchmark simulation I find an error. This got me thinking, why is there no good way to test parallel code? However I am determined to create something useful and I will give it all I got