IDEAS-ECP
Building a productive and sustainable exascale software ecosystem
About the Exascale Computing Project
The mission of the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) is to accelerate delivery of a capable exascale computing ecosystem that will provide breakthrough solutions to address America’s most critical challenges in scientific discovery, energy assurance, economic competitiveness, and national security.
IDEAS in the ECP: Summary
The ECP sets a very aggressive goal, which requires intensive development activities on the part of both scientific applications and the supporting software tools and technologies. Developers must adapt to and anticipate new computer architectures and scale their codes to levels not previously possible, often also requiring new algorithms and approaches within the software. The role of IDEAS within the ECP is to help ease the challenges of software development in this environment, and to help the development teams ensure that DOE investment in the exascale software ecosystem is as productive and sustainable as possible.
Areas of Activity
Our ECP-supported work includes activities that are specifically focused on software development efforts within the ECP as well as more broadly based activities that benefit both ECP members and the broader communities in high-performance computing (HPC) and computational science and engineering (CSE).
- Working with individual ECP application development and software technology teams to understand productivity bottlenecks and improve software development practices through the Productivity and Sustainability Improvement Planning (PSIP) methodology.
- Customizing and curating methodologies to improve the software practices of individuals and teams.
- Establishing and providing editorial support for the Better Scientific Software (BSSw) website (BSSw.io), a community-driven hub for sharing information on practices, techniques, experiences, tools, and other resources to improve developer productivity and software sustainability (Contributors welcome!).
- Launching the BSSw Fellows Program to foster and promote practices, processes, and tools to improve developer productivity and software sustainability of scientific codes.
- Partnering with DOE leadership computing facilities to jointly develop training content, work with their delivery mechanisms, and address challenges in ECP software deployment.
- Using our interactions with ECP software developers to help identify other training and support needs and working with ECP leadership to appropriately address them.
- Organizing the Best Practices for HPC Software Developers webinar series and other tutorials, with an emphasis on topics related to software productivity and sustainability.
- Organizing other events that promote the discussion of software development experiences, including minisymposia, birds-of-a-feather sessions, and more.
Sponsor
This work is supported by the Exascale Computing Project (17-SC-20-SC), a collaborative effort of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration.
