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Our next Retreat is on the 9th and 10th of November at Seepark Hotel am Wandlitzsee.

See you there.

FONDA scientist Sebastian Müller of the subproject A3 presents “Metamorphic Testing for Scientific Software” in Chicago on October 16-18 at 1st annual conference of the US Research Software Engineering Association. The abstract and more information can be found here.

FONDA invites you to the presentation Dynamic Distributed Physical Design for Database Systems by Khuzaima Daudjee (University of Waterloo) on 27th June 2023, 15:00. The presentation is at Großer Seminarraum (Room 219/220), Albert-Einsteinstrasse 9, Berlin (Adlershof).

Abstract:

Database workloads can be varying, placing changing demands on a system. To meet this challenge, a distributed database system can adjust its physical design, i.e., its data mastering, replication and partitioning schemes to deliver good performance.  I will present MorphoSys, a distributed database system we have built that caters to workload shifts and changes through autonomous metamorphosis of its distributed physical design.

Bio:

Khuzaima Daudjee is a professor at the University of Waterloo.  His research interests are in designing and building large-scale data systems and on providing systems-level support for applications such as streaming, graph processing and machine learning.  His work has led to several awards including Best Paper Award at ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing and ACM SIGMOD Best Demonstration Awards.  He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist.

Special thanks to Prof. Dr. Ina Schaefer (Karlsruher Institut für Technologie) for the presentation on “Correctness-by-Construction – How Can We Build Better Software?” and to Prof. Dr. Thomas Kosch (HU-Berlin) on “ChatGPT und Worfklows”.

Dear Colleagues,

We’re pleased to inform you that our computational cluster at Humboldt University of Berlin has transitioned from the testing phase to full production. After successful test runs involving bioinformatics and earth observation workflows, we are now fully operational.

All project participants can now create their accounts and start using the computational cluster for their research activities, just by sending us an e-mail at “vasilis.bountris at informatik.hu-berlin.de”. We have also successfully integrated four additional nodes, each armed with a T4 GPU, to bolster our Machine Learning computational capacity. In the following months, another 10 nodes will be added to the cluster. You can always find detailed and up-to-date information on our wiki website:
https://wikis.hu-berlin.de/fonda/FONDA_Services_at_HU_Berlin

We look forward to the exciting research outcomes this resource will enable.

The Collaborative Research Center 1404 FONDA (Foundations of Workflows for Large-Scale Scientific Data Analysis) welcomes the first two guests to our female internship program.

Annaëlle Maire is a master’s student at the Télécom Physique Strasbourg
engineering school, studying computer science. As part of her end-of-study internship, she joined FONDA to work on current workflow management systems. More specifically, she is working on FONDA’s B5 sub-project and is participating in the development of a common API between a workflow management system and a resource manager in order to optimize the scheduling of workflows.

Pauline Karega is a master’s student from Nairobi, Kenya. She is
interested in genomic data science and is studying genomic workflows to
help in subproject A2 in FONDA.

The next FONDA Retreat will take place from June 5 to June 6.
We will go to Tagungshotel Sommerfeld in Kremmen this time (link to Openstreetmap).

For poster templates and additional information, visit our internal wiki.

For any further questions, contact our Scientific Coordinator.

Keynote

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ina Schaefer (Karlsruher Institut für Technologie)

Correctness-by-Construction – How Can We Build Better Software?

Correctness-by-Construction (CbC) is an incremental software development technique to create functionally correct programs guided by a specification. In contrast to post-hoc verification, where the specification and verification mainly take part after implementing a program, with CbC the specification is defined first, and then the program is successively created using a small set of refinement rules. This specification-first approach has the advantage that errors are likely to be detected earlier in the design process and can be tracked more easily. Even though the idea of CbC emerged many years ago, CbC has not yet achieved its full potential in industrial practice. However, we believe that a scaled CbC approach contributes to solving problems of modern software development. In this tech talk, I will give an overview of our work on CbC in four different lines of research, including developing configurable as well as safety- and security-critical software systems. For all of these, we provide tool support building the CorC ecosystem that facilitates CbC-based development in different fields of application and for differing sizes of software systems.

Time Plan

On May 15, Lloyd Montgomery will do a Nano course on “Mental Health Awareness and Management: Engineering Academic Well-Being”.
We will start at 10.00h and end at 12.00h.
The Nano will take place at the Humboldt Kabinett (link to the location).

For additional information, visit our internal wiki.

Welcome to our IRTG on June 13th!

The IRTG takes place on Tuesday the 13th of June 2023 in  Erwin
Schrödinger-Zentrum, Rudower Chaussee 26, 12489 Berlin (Adlershof),
Vortragsraum 0’101.

Afterward, we will go over to the MOPS (link to the location) again to have a BBQ together.

We are pleased to share that our interdisciplinary research project has recently reached an important milestone with the successful completion of the first test runs of bioinformatics workflows with Nextflow and earth observation workflows with Airflow using our new computational cluster.

Following the results of these initial test runs, we are now preparing to take the next steps in the project. In the coming weeks, researchers and collaborators will receive invitations via email to create accounts on the computational cluster, allowing them to actively participate and work directly with the cluster to further our shared objectives. Additionally, we are looking forward to the integration of four additional nodes, each equipped with a T4 GPU, into our computational cluster.