Scientific software is how we collaborate, encapsulating expertise across disciplines.

Scientific software is broadly recognized as a cornerstone of sustained collaboration and scientific advances. However, disruptive changes in computer architectures and the complexities of tackling new frontiers in next-generation modeling, simulation, analysis, and design present daunting challenges to the productivity of software developers and the sustainability of software artifacts.

We face unprecedented complexity and continual change in computer architectures.

The transition to hosted accelerated architectures, specifically nodes with multicore CPU and multiple GPUs, requires developing new algorithmic approaches, porting code to new compiling and runtime environments, and realizing massive concurrency that is possible only by overcoming large latency bottlenecks. Furthermore, these new CPU/GPU platforms represent only the beginning of the system heterogeneity expected in the future.

The needs of next-generation science continually push advances in software capabilities.

Teams are working toward predictive science and engineering through multiphysics, multiscale simulations and analytics and are addressing requirements for greater scientific reproducibility. Intensive development is required for both scientific applications and 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.

Next-generation science demands continual advances in software quality — for everyone.

Members of the computational science community — especially at extreme scales but more broadly at all scales of computing — face an urgent need to improve software quality so that we can work more productively and have full confidence in scientific results. We must work to improve developer productivity (increasing product quality while decreasing development effort and time) and software sustainability (reducing the cost of maintaining, sustaining, and evolving software capabilities).

IDEAS: Partnering with the community to advance scientific software practices

The role of IDEAS is to help ease the challenges of software development in advanced computing environments, and to help development teams ensure that DOE investment in the advanced software ecosystems is as productive and sustainable as possible.

IDEAS projects are collaborating with the community on scientific software ecosystems that emphasize the use and development of high-quality tools, the adaptation and adoption of modern software engineering methodologies, and the development and use of high-quality software components in the composition of next-generation applications.

IDEAS goals are to qualitatively change the culture of high-performance scientific computing and to provide a foundation (through software productivity methodologies and an advanced software ecosystem) that enables transformative and reliable next-generation predictive science and decision support.