RE: Computing school Florence 2005

["David Watkin" <david.watkin@chemistry.oxford.ac.uk>]

Dear All

	Before nominations for coordinators are sent in , would it be useful to
collect a list of topics, subjects, themes - ideas in any sense - of what
might be included in the school,  so that the coordinators know what
material they need to coordinate?  I can imagine that there might be
sufficient material of general interest to warant more than just plenaries.
For example, the design of shareable internal data representations and the
design of software-to-software interfaces. Shareable external
representations now make it (relatively) easy to share data between labs,
but sharing code is a nightmare.
	Another topic might be software libraries.  Although it's convenient and
cost effective to call commercial libraries during program devleopment
stages, if the program is eventually going to be distributed without charge,
the commercial modules have to be replaced by others.
	A final suggestion is Program Validation. Two implementations of anything
but the most trivial algorithm might give marginally different results
(because programmers need to make decisions about precision of
representations, order of evaluation, thresholds etc).  These differnces can
be assessed and put into context. A more serious problem is when there is
only one implementaion, and hence no external comparisions.  Making the code
available for inspection in theory means it can be validated, but by whom?

Best wishes
			David

-----Original Message-----
From: compcomm-l@iucr.org [mailto:compcomm-l@iucr.org]On Behalf Of
a.l.spek
Sent: 04 November 2002 11:22 am
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: Computing school Florence 2005


Dear all,

	I think that, based on recent supportive contributions on this
discussion list, we should now agree on a tentative format.

My proposal would be a 5 day meeting (18-22 august 2005, arrival aug 17),
prior to the congress (23-31 aug 2005) to be held at the congress site.

The school should attract interest from both the macromolecular and
chemical crystallographers.

A practical format for the program would include to three streams of
lectures:

1 - one addressing macromolecular issues
2 - one addressing small-molecule/powder issues
3 - one addressing issues of general interest

streams 1 & 2 can be run in parallel (requiring two lecture rooms)
stream 3 should be planary and likely at the beginning of each day.

We likely need three names charged with coordinating the program of
each stream.

Please comment

Best wishes

Ton Spek (Chair Computing Commission)
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