PESO: Partnering for Scientific-Software Ecosystem Opportunities

PESO Overview

The PESO Project seeks to establish robust and sustainable scientific software capabilities aligned with the interests of the Department of Energy Office (DOE) of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) via partnerships with software teams and communities within DOE, other US agencies, commercial scientific software developers, and the broader open source software community. PESO (pronounced pay-so, as in the currency), in partnership with these teams and communities, engages with scientific computing stakeholders, including DOE computing facilities, hardware and software vendors, other software organizations, US agencies, and industrial and international institutions. The goal of these engagements is to advance scientific pursuits by providing advanced scientific libraries and tools to the user community in ways that optimize the cost and benefit sharing of DOE's scientific software investments.

Are these challeges familiar to you?

• Installing 3rd party libs and tools: Ensuring correct installation of external libraries can be complex, with potential compatibility and dependency issues causing build or runtime failures.
• Managing library version updates: Updating libraries and tools is essential for security and performance, but new versions can introduce breaking changes, requiring careful planning and testing.
• Adopting new libraries and tools: Integrating new libraries and tools can enhance functionality but may disrupt existing workflows and require time for team adaptation.
• Managing portability across CPUs/GPUs: Ensuring software runs efficiently on different hardware platforms requires careful management of dependencies and build configurations.
• Long build times: Increased project complexity can lead to longer build times, slowing down development and testing processes.
• Out-of-date algorithms: Relying on outdated algorithms can cause inefficiencies and security risks, making timely updates crucial.
• Awareness of latest SW practices: Staying up-to-date with modern practices is important but challenging due to the fast pace of industry changes.
• Opportunities to improve how you engage with the broader community: Finding community members who share your interested and challenges is essential to growth but hard to accomplish.

PESO can help!

PESO’s vision is that DOE software investments will have maximum impact by:

• Delivering a robust, evolving, and widely-available portfolio of scientific libraries and tools to the community: We provide a scientific software ecosystem via Spack and E4S, consisting of high-quality libraries and tools developed by the CASS community and other providers, deliver the latest high-performance algorithms and capabilities to applications at DOE and beyond. Partnering with others, PESO will provide critical services and products that transform a broad collection of independently developed products by independent teams into a product portfolio whose total is much more than the sum of its parts.
• Improving the quality of the work we do by focusing on user and developer experience for improved impact of our libraries and tools on the scientific community: We invest in scientific approaches improving user and developer experiences, including a better understanding and improvement of software product management, integration, and delivery, software quality assurance, and security.
• Focusing on community engagement as a first-order priority: We will collaborate in CASS efforts to foster an inclusive workforce with sustainable career paths. We will shepherd the Better Scientific Software Fellows Program and contribute to the leadership of the BSSw.io web portal.