The twenty-first session of the LSST Discovery Alliance DSFP was hosted by the Center for Astrophysical Surveys and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The curriculum focuses on Software Engineering and Databases.
The guest instructors for S21 were:
Dr. Scotty Coughlin, Northwestern University
Dr. Lehman Garrison, Scientific Computing Core, Flatiron Institute
Olivia Lynn, LINCC Frameworks, Carnegie Mellon University
Dr. Veronica Dike, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Additional lectures were given by the DSFP leadership team:
Dr. Bryan Scott 
Dr. Adam Miller
"Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases."
~ Norman Ralph Augustine
Monday, June 3, 2024
Data for day one exercises is available here.
- 09:00 AM – 09:30 AM o Introduction of Guest Instructors and Code of Conduct Conversation
- 09:30 AM - 10:30 AM o Lecture I Introduction to Software Engineering and Repositories; B. Scott
- 10:30 AM – 11:00 AM o BREAK
- 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM o Problem I Software Repositories
- 12:00 PM – 01:30 PM o LUNCH
- 01:30 PM – 01:45 PM o Lecture II Data Wrangling; B. Scott
- 01:45 PM – 03:00 PM o Problem II Data Wrangling; B. Scott
- 03:00 PM – 03:30 PM o BREAK
- 03:30 PM - 04:30 PM o Lecture III – Intro to OOP; O. Lynn (Slides / Notebook)
- 04:30 PM - 05:30 PM o Problem III – Problem: OOP; O. Lynn
"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
~ Charles Babbage
Tuesday, June 4, 2024
- 09:00 PM – 09:15 AM o Lecture IV This Laptop is Inadquate & Introduction to Data Organization; B. Scott
- 09:15 PM – 10:30 AM o Problem IV Introduction to Data Organization; B. Scott
- 10:30 AM – 11:00 AM o BREAK
- 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM o [Lecture V][(https://github.com/LSSTC-DSFP/Session-21/tree/main/Day2/SQL) – Databases, SQL, and Django; S. Coughlin
- 12:00 AM - 01:30 PM o LUNCH
- 01:30 PM – 03:00 PM Problem V – Problem: SQL servers and database queries; S. Coughlin
- 03:00 PM – 04:00 PM o Lecture VI – NoSQL databases: MongoDB; S. Coughlin
- 04:00 PM - 04:30 PM o BREAK
- 04:30 PM – 06:00 PM o Problem VI – NoSQL queries; S. Coughlin
"To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge."
~ Grace Hopper
Wednesday, June 5, 2024
- 09:00 AM - 10:00 AM o Lecture VII OOP Deep Dives; O. Lynn
- 10:00 AM - 10:30 AM o BREAK
- 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM o Problem VII OOP Exercise: QUAIL; O. Lynn
- 12:00 PM - ??:?? PM o BREAK
Visit and Tour of NCSA
"That, if a straight line falling on two straight lines make the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if produced indefinitely, meet on that side on which are the angles less than the two right angles."
~ Euclid
Thursday, June 6, 2024
- 09:00 AM – 10:00 AM o Lecture VIII: Endgame Essentials: CI, Docs, and Everything in Between; O. Lynn
- 10:00 AM – 10:30 AM o BREAK
- 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM o Problem VIII Endgame Essentials; O. Lynn
- 12:00 PM – 01:30 PM o LUNCH
- 01:30 PM – 02:30 PM o Lecture IX: High-Performance Python and Parallelization; L. Garrison
- 02:30 PM – 04:00 PM o Problem IX: High-Performance Python and Parallelization; L. Garrison
- 04:00 PM – 04:30 PM o BREAK
- 04:30 PM – 05:00 PM o Hack Pitch Session
- 06:00 PM - ??:?? PM o Group Dinner: Big Grove Tavern 1 E Main St. Champaign, IL
"It takes four hundred thirty people to man a starship. With this, you don't need anyone. One machine can do all those things they send men out to do now. Men no longer need die in space, or on some alien world. Men can live, and go on to achieve greater things than fact-finding and dying for galactic space, which is neither ours to give or to take. Can't understand. We don't want to destroy life, we want to save it."
~ Dr. Richard Daystrom, Star Trek TOS: The Ultimate Computer
Friday, June 7, 2024
- 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM o Lecture X: GPU-Accelerated Python; L. Garrison
- 10:00 AM - 10:30 AM o BREAK
- 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM o Problem X: GPU-Accelerated Python; L. Garrison
- 12:00 PM – 01:30 PM o LUNCH
- 01:30 PM – 04:30 PM o Hack Session;
- 04:30 PM – 05:00 PM o Hack Session Results, Summary of Software Engineering + Databases, and Farewell to Cohort 6
