Texas A&M nuclear engineering graduate students in the computational group came together January 9-10 in the second annual "Code-A-Thon." Over the course of two 12-hour days, a dozen students worked collaboratively to create a Multi-material Eulerian Hydrodynamics code from scratch. They were joined by Dr. McClarren, a faculty member in the department, and Dr. Rockefeller, a staff scientist at Los Alamos National Lab.
The students formed groups that were responsible for writing individual components of the code. Working in tangent, they used modern coding practices to produce tests for the code as, or sometimes before, they built it. The final result: a code that will be used by current and future graduate students in the department as a research bed for trying new ideas and an invaluable learning experience for all those involved.
Dr. McClarren began this "Code-A-Thon" as a chance for students to learn a valuable skill by working on a large computer code of their own design, outside of the traditional classroom experience. It also is similar to the working environment in industry: team-based work with a set of deliverables.