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Dr Mark Parsons

Commercial Director, EPCC

[email protected]+44 131 650 5022

The mechanics

of EPCC

How EPCC learnt to do technology transfer

and software engineering the hard way

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The mechanics of EPCC 2

Structure of talk

What is EPCC today

Learning to deliver on time

The structure of a commercial project

Software development and OGSA-DAI

Project management

Questions and discussion
http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/

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EPCC Activities

Europes largest, most successfulsupercomputing centre 15 years old

Vital statistics: 65 staff 3.2M turnover (almost) all from external sources

Multidisciplinary and multi-funded with a large spectrum of activities and a critical mass of expertise

Strong engagement with industry

from local SMEs to large multinationals project based consultancy services

Supports research at University of Edinburgh viaaccess to facilities training and support TRACS visitor programme

NeSC founding partner of National e-Science Centre

Wide variety of leading-edge systems 1,600 processor HPCx system 2,000 processor IBM Bluegene/L 12,000 processor QCDOC

New investment in Advanced Computing Facility

EPCC has a unique breadth of expertise in highperformance computing

TechnologyTransfer

Training

EuropeanCoordination

HPCResearchFacilities

VisitorProgramme
http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/

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Commercial activities today

Bespoke software development and software project management for

business network, cluster and high-performance computing

novel application areas

from mushrooms to internet packets

Start-to-finish projects

full software development lifecycle, 3 - 12+ months most commercial projects are < 6 months

Operate like a business Commercial Group brings in business, Software Development Group delivers

charge at commercial rates ($1,000 per day)

very delivery focused

all commercial contracts are fixed cost

funded by cash contracts, public funds and European Commission, EU

many of the smaller projects are supported by SE

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Clients

USA:

o Cisco Systems Inco Sun Microsystems Inco IBM Corporationo Oracle Corporation

o Hewlett Packardo Microsofto Xilinx Corporation

Japan:

o Hitachi

o NEC Europeo Fujitsu Labs EuropeEurope:

o European Commission

+ many EU project partners

UK:

o Almond Engineering Ltd

o Altamira Ltdo Arran Aromatics Ltd

o Callanders Sawmills Ltd

o Calman Ltd

o CB Technology Ltd

o Centre for Customer Awareness Ltd

o CERNo Cheltenham & Gloucester plco DTIo Digital Bridges Ltdo Elektrobit Ltd

o First Group plco Golden Crumb Ltd

o High Speed Productions Ltd

o Integriti Solutions Ltd

o IP Technology Ltd

o Ironside Farrar Ltd

o Jardine Technology Ltd

o Peppers Ghost Productions Ltdo Radar World Ltdo Red Lemon Ltd

o Rosti (Scotland) Ltdo Quadstone Ltd

o SCI Ltd

o Scottish Enterpriseo The Crown Officeo TSB Bank Scotland Ltdo UK Meteorological Officeo Upstream Systems Ltd

o Alpha Data Parallel Systems Ltd

o Nallatech Ltd

2000 - 2004

UK:

o Almond Engineering Ltd

o Altamira Ltdo Arran Aromatics Ltdo Callanders Sawmills Ltdo Calman Ltdo CB Technology Ltdo Centre for Customer Awareness Ltdo CERNo Cheltenham & Gloucester plco DTIo Digital Bridges Ltdo Elektrobit Ltd

o First Group plco Golden Crumb Ltdo High Speed Productions Ltdo Integriti Solutions Ltdo IP Technology Ltdo Ironside Farrar Ltdo Jardine Technology Ltdo Peppers Ghost Productions Ltdo Radar World Ltdo Red Lemon Ltd

o Rosti (Scotland) Ltdo Quadstone Ltdo SCI Ltdo Scottish Enterpriseo The Crown Officeo TSB Bank Scotland Ltdo UK Meteorological Officeo Upstream Systems Ltdo Alpha Data Parallel Systems Ltdo Nallatech Ltd

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Business Strategy

to solve business problems NOT sell technology individual solutions for clients

Technology Push Down

OGSA-DAI

IPO

First Group

PGPGridSunDCG

MicrosoftC&GAutoscreen

CCA X,000

X00,000

X,000,000

AcademicResearch

Project size

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How do we work?

No.

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How do we work?

Take pride in a professional approach Work in small project teams

Project leader, 1-6 developers, technical reviewers

Use documented engineering & management processes Project management based on PRINCE2

Engineering using agile methods

Built from experience and industry best practice Iterative/staged development techniques

Requirements triage Test-driven development

Tuned to the leading edge of innovative software development

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Who does the work?

Currently around 4 business development staff 2 focus on business development

2 focus on marketing and publicity

Currently around 20 engineering staff

Three full-time project managers, two software architects c. 15 consultants and principal consultants

Staff backgrounds maths , physics, computer & life sciences

Over 100 staff-years of experience, over 1/3 from industry

Typical skills Java, C/C++, Visual Basic/C#, Perl, Fortran

Distributed computing, webservices, XML, J2EE, MPI, OpenMP

Databases, SQL, JDBC, XML-DB

Software engineering, OO design, UML

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EPCCs early history

Established in 1990 focus for interest in parallel computing within Physics and CS

Early years largely supported by UK Government Parallel

Applications Programme

made lots of money working with large UK corporations tooptimise/parallelise their codes

How did our funding model come about? from a belief in the self-funding of University

research

weve shown it can be done but its verydifficult

it did mean we had to work with industry fromthe beginning
http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/

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EPCC history (continued)

1990-1994 funded by UK Government Parallel Applications Programme

grew to 65 staff

many parallelisation projects with UK industry aerospace, nuclear,oil & gas etc etc

span out company Quadstone 1995-1996

as Gov money dried up so did projects

had to move from long term projects (18 months) to much shorter

projects (3-6 months) major problem project / cost overruns

nearly had to make many staff redundant

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EPCC history (continued)

1997-2000 successfully moved markets from large-scale industry to SMEs

opportunities focussed around successful EU TTN project

projects 3-6 months in duration

embarked on having a repeatable process

2000-now over the past few years moved into Grid computing

continued to work with industry

wide variety of projects:

OGSA-DAI data access & integration for the Grid Intersim packet level modelling of differentiated services

Golden Crumb automatic mushroom selection in factory

Cheltenham & Gloucester data mining for mortgage industry

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How does EPCC work today?

We have well developed project processes

Two linked processes software development process

project management process

Will illustrate software development process using OGSA-DAI as example

Recently moved to PRINCE2 project management

methodology

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The project lifecyle

Commercial Group identifies clients and initiates discussions

Following initial discussions CD and technical staff visit

company to discuss requirements

High level design written timings / costs agreed

may involve free code survey at this point Contract negotiated fixed price includes detailed

workplan based on design

Project handed to IS staff scheduled according to skills

All projects have Project Leader, Applications Consultant, Technical Reviewer

Regular meetings between IS and CG

CG act as account manager to company / funder

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OGSA-DAI

Data Access and Integration for databases resources on the Grid

Aim to deliver application mechanisms that: Meet the data requirements of Grid applications

Functionally, performance and reliability

Reduce development cost of data centric Grid applications

Provide consistent interfaces to data resources

Acceptable and supportable by database providers

Trustable, imposed demand is acceptable, etc.

Provide a standard framework that satisfies standard requirements

A base for developing higher-level services

Data federation / Distributed query processing Data mining

Data visualisation

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OGSA-DAI team

IBM Development Team, Hursley

NEReSC, Newcastle

NeSC, EdinburghEPCC Team, Edinburgh

ESNW, Manchester

IBM Dissemination Team

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Software Process and Teams

Testing

Reqs.

Prototype

Prioritisation

Fix Bugs

UseCases Requests

Design Implement QA

Release

SupportTest Cases

Programme

Board

Technical

Review Board

Technical

Reviewer

DEVELOPERS

USERS

REV

IEW

Contribs

Ingest

Dissem.

Training

Nightly unit +system tests

Additionaltest cases

System testsbased on reqs

Continual process

Deep trackfeatures

Users

Group

Peer Review

and Inspection

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http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/

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An agile approach to development

Agility is all

Grid/HPC environments and problems = complex systems

complex systems = big, complex projects

big, complex projects = high risk of failure

adopting incremental approaches to requirements, design, and

implementation helps minimise risk delivering small increments regularly is good

good for quality, for visibility, for morale

Keep your eyes on the road

keep an active eye on project risks think about what happens if this goes wrong

just thinking about it reduces the likelihood itll happen!

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Releasing software

No release schedule = no releases

dont timebox research, but do timebox development HPC is fun and exciting - beware feature creep!

hows the project?

oh, were 95% there (and always will be)

frequent release milestones focus developers

but dont overspecify what will be released

OGSA-DAI had the opposite problem three months too short

six months about right major/minor/patch/special brew

set your testing timetable in stone

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Requirements, requirements, requirements

write em down! Give em numbers! remember, requirements arent just functional!

whatever they are, they are always testable

tests on HPC systems may be tricky, but thatmakes it fun!

MoSCoW notation is good Must, Should, Could, Won't

how important are Priority 3 requirements again..?

OGSA-DAI had lots of requirements

but make sure you can understand their worth real users are often better than good ideas

a user group helps to focus development as software matures

Know your requirements

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Return, recycle, reuse

Throwaway prototypes never are

once Ive proved this, Ill junk the code

no, you wont (or your grad student wont)

apply some basic process even to trivial codes

even reuse of good code is sometimes wrong

OGSA-DAI started with high ideals beware the big ball of mud

patterns in architecture

Shantytown

enables quick exploration of feature territory must be built on a strong central foundation

must include council legislation aka testing

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OGSA-DAI Dashboard

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Can I see your documents please?

Document! Document! Document!

Imagine trying to program without a language reference

structure and stability is good

Get people who like writing documents to do them

but get everyone to doc their code

a single editor can provide guidance Good code documentation can be used by the tooling

Good human documentation will win your users support

Make sure you dont underestimate the cost code maintenance and documentation takes longer than code

development

make it part of the process

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People power

Social engineering is the key

Push decisions down to the developers

Too many chiefs

make sure you know what are the key battles to win

Have a process for change

or one person will become very unpopular developers and managers both think they know whats best

Understand your teams

different people like working in different ways

no one style for management in OGSA-DAI

Competition is good

go one better

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The big picture

Balance the hype

software engineering is about vision vs effort vs requests expectation management is important

researchers, developers, users and funders are all different

and all want different things

the larger the project, the harder it falls

Listen to your users useability is good

it has to install easily

dont change your interface

client tooling helps

support helpdesk is better

user groups are interesting

S f d l

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Software development summary

Agile methods are very sympathetic

the Agile founders disliked Rigid Inflexible Processes too!

Adopt a simple process and toolset even lightweight process really pays off

scoping, requirements and risk analysis up front

incremental approach to design, develop, test

learn some basic tools (theyre even free!)

distributed teams are hard to manage strictly

distributed management is even harder

Listen to your customers they always know best

P j M

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Project Management

All technical staff have a line manager and at least one

project leader

Procedures are well documented and have grown up over

time

Recently we have moved to PRINCE2 project managementmethodology for commercial projects

seems to work well but is a bit of a culture shock

We employ staff specifically for project management

All staff time is logged planned and actual

A working day has two blocks of 3 hours

Staff can bid for time to do research / proposal writing

Wh i PRINCE2?

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What is PRINCE2?

PRojects IN Controlled Environments version 2

A project management standard produced by UKs Office ofGovernment Commerce (part of DTI)

PRINCE2 is a process-based approach for project managementproviding an easily tailored, and scalable method for the managementof all types of projects

PRINCE2 is a de factoUK PM standard becoming mandatory in the public sector (Gov, NHS, Police)

becoming PM method of choice in business

Unilever, GlaxoWellcome, Tesco, BT, Sun, TSB, NatWest,

Norwich Union, Centrica, Cable & Wireless becoming widespread in Europe too

PRINCE2 is internationally recognised and respected

Wh t i PRINCE2 t?
http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/

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What is PRINCE2 not?

PRINCE2 is not a software engineering method

but it grew out of an IT environment

and it fits well with traditional or agile development methods alike

PRINCE2 will not help you code better but it will help you deliver better quality products, on time

and will stop you falling out with your boss/staff

PRINCE2 will not tell you how to write software but it will leave you alone to write software your way

PRINCE2 is not a silver bullet but its general, flexible and tailorable and most importantlyits

based on common sense

PRINCE2 i t h ll
http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/

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PRINCE2 in a nutshell

Projects have a clear Business Case or they dont happen

remind me again why were doing this project?

Projects have a beginning, a middle and an end clearly defined they start and they stopthey dont weeble on forever

Projects run in stages with clearly defined boundaries get a clear picture of how were all doing

Product-based planning focuses on deliverables not tasks think what do we have to make?

Layered management: corporate, board, project, team each level has a clearly defined interface with the others

Management by exception if there are no problems, just carry onmanagement dont meddle

Change is fundamental: change management is intrinsic assume things will change and plan accordingly

Th PRINCE2 di

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The PRINCE2 process diagram

Corporate or Programme Management

Directing a Project

Starting upa Project

Planning

Initiating aProject

Controllinga Stage

Managing

Product

Delivery

ManagingStage

Boundaries

Closing aProject

Project

Mandate

PRINCE2 C t
http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/http://www.prince2.com/whatisp2.htmlhttp://www.prince2.com/whatisp2.htmlhttp://www.prince2.com/whatisp2.htmlhttp://www.prince2.com/whatisp2.htmlhttp://www.prince2.com/whatisp2.htmlhttp://www.prince2.com/whatisp2.htmlhttp://www.prince2.com/whatisp2.htmlhttp://www.prince2.com/whatisp2.htmlhttp://www.prince2.com/whatisp2.htmlhttp://www.prince2.com/whatisp2.htmlhttp://www.prince2.com/whatisp2.htmlhttp://www.prince2.com/whatisp2.htmlhttp://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/

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PRINCE2 Components

As well as the processesthere are several complementary

components The Business Case

a key driver the Why?for the project

either a genuine (commercial) business case or at least a set ofcompelling reasons

owned by the Executive

monitored throughout the project

if the BC goes away, the project should be stopped

The Project Organisation describes the four management layers

corporate, board, project, team

everyone should have a job description

make roles and responsibilities clear

PRINCE2 C t (2)

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PRINCE2 Components (2)

Plans

product-based, as discussed above

write product descriptions for key products

Controls divide the project into Management Stages

a Stage is as far ahead as you can plan in reasonable detail

typically a few months

define reports, meetings etc.

Tolerances allowed variations in time, budget, scope before escalation triggered

you have six months, +/- 1 month

you must satisfy these requirements; those are optional this stage


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Quality

the project must define methods for QC and test

quality checks should be built in to the MP process

Risk think about it, monitor it

one of the best management tools is to ask what might go wrong?

and create plans to handle it if it does

Configuration Management keep track of product versions and histories

software version control tools are a good way of implementing this

PRINCE2 Summary

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PRINCE2 Summary

PRINCE2 is a powerful, flexible, scalable PM approach

Its based on industry best practice rooted in software development projects

Provides good, intelligent layers of management control

Formalises, in a positive way, customer relations

Can fit easily with agile software development

Its the only PM approach with internationally recognised

qualifications

Final comments on working with industry

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Final comments on working with industry

Wear a tie!

Remember that the person youre meeting is just as nervous

of meeting a mad academic as you are of meet a rapacious

capitalist

The managing director of the company may be drunk

Always apply Denis Healeys law of holes: When in one stop

digging

If youre going to deliver late tell the customer straightaway

Listen listen listen!!! Its the only way to get business

Questions / discussion

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Questions / discussion

?

Documents

NCSA Parsons 090905