The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics is organizing a Workshop on Advanced Techniques for Scientific Programming and Management of Open Source Software Packages, to be held at ICTP (Trieste, Italy) from 10 to 21 March 2014, followed by a one-week LAMMPS Users and Developers Worskhop and Symposium.

Modern scientific research work involves using computers for simulation, modeling, data processing and visualization. The growing complexity of those calculations favors using software packages that provide an abstract interface to computations through scripting language interfaces, modular software design, and code reuse. Such design patterns also facilitate transparent optimizations for modern multi-core architectures or accelerators, and specialization of contributors to subsets of a package program. Software package developers therefore need to learn how to work effectively in a collaborative environment. 

This Hands-on Workshop focuses on disseminating best practices and building fundamental skills in creating, extending and collaborating on modular and reusable software frameworks with a scripting language interface. The curriculum also covers using modern collaborative software management tools, testing frameworks, and embedding structured documentation into software packages.

The optional LAMMPS Users and Developers Workshop and Symposium during the third week takes the LAMMPS Molecular Dynamics package as an example and provides specialized training for computational scientists that already are or want to become LAMMPS developers. The training will consist of lectures on the LAMMPS software overall design and implementation details as well as hand-on tutorial sessions by LAMMPS experts and developers.