The most important aspect of the SDAV institute is to deliver tools and technologies to DOE scientists that can not only scale to large core counts but also can be sustainable. Scientific software often emerges from research as a prototype, and with additional work to package, document, and test becomes a software product, a production tool that is ready to be deployed and used by others. Our Institute favors these software products - libraries and frameworks - over custom solutions. Products that benefit from an economy of scale in development and deployment, often receive leverage from other funding agencies, are higher quality software, and enjoy more sustainable futures. Of course, our overall goal is to assist applications teams with their data management, analysis, and visualization needs to achieve breakthrough science, so in some cases we may deploy custom solutions to meet these goals at minimum cost.
Simply devoting the majority of our resources to libraries and frameworks is still a daunting task: there is a large number of each that we could potentially support. We approach this challenge by judiciously supporting technologies required by application scientists, and, when possible, converging on a minimal set of technologies that can easily be supported by our team. Further, many of these technologies provide complementary functionality and, where appropriate, we plan to increase their interoperability, providing new capabilities to application scientists at reduced development costs.
The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF)
Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF)
National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC)