Coach Thrasher

RegCM and the Scientific Method

My wife is doing her graduate work at UCSC and using the RegCM regional climate model to simulate atmospheric conditions during the Eocene era. She frequently finds bugs in the code (FORTRAN), but she has no way to keep track of what changed other than creating a versioned tar ball of the whole code tree for each version change.

Recently she found a bug that affects all of the research she's done for the past 3 years. The bug likely affects countless other researchers and their published work, possibly invalidating their findings. This sounds incredibly troubling to me, but there's no way to understand what bugs those other researchers may have been affected by because they don't reference a version, branch, or tag, of any code tree.

How can any of their research be repeatable if they don't reference a version of their code? This seems like a fundamental flaw in implementation of the scientific method.

This has been driving me crazy because I would never embark on a large software project without a source control system. I would go insane tracking all of the changes, and trying to ascertain what happened when something didn't work.

After a little searching, I found a free SVN hosting solution at Code Spaces for her to use. It's not hosted at SourceForge, Google Code, or other OSS access points because we have little understanding of the licensing controls on the code, which is managed by some nice Italian climate researchers.

If anyone is interested in using the SVN system to track changes, here's where it lives:

http://svn.codespaces.com/regcm/regcm/

To check it out, just run:

svn co http://svn.codespaces.com/regcm/regcm/trunk regcm

Posted at 12:30PM Jun 27, 2008 by jason in Software  |