Mission
Promote the development and use of scientific software as an ecosystem with stakeholders and partners who engage with the US Department of Energy (DOE) in developing and using advanced high-performance computing.
Vision
PESO will steward and advance a scientific software ecosystem with stakeholders and partners who engage with the US Department of Energy (DOE) in developing and using advanced high-performance computing.
PESO’s vision is that DOE software investments will have maximum impact by providing a sustainable scientific software ecosystem, consisting of high-quality libraries and tools that deliver the latest high-performance algorithms and capabilities to serve application needs 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. Furthermore, by working with product teams, users, stakeholders, computing facilities, other US agencies, and industry, we will provide a transition of activities from the DOE Exascale Computing Project (ECP) toward the goal of creating a software ecosystem that year over year will deliver high-quality, reliable, and trusted libraries and tools for DOE’s mission-critical applications.
ECP efforts have demonstrated that developing applications built on accelerator-optimized libraries and tools can improve scientific capabilities by two orders of magnitude or more, and that a trusted software stack is an essential element. PESO will provide the trusted software stack for applications to realize that 100X improvement — for high-end capabilities and for energy efficiency improvements that can be realized only by leveraging accelerator devices.
Background
Scientific libraries and tools have been developed for decades, providing value to the scientific community, primarily via distinct and independent efforts. PESO provides a mechanism to bring these efforts together, to provide a more coherent and comprehensive set of capabilities to the scientific community. By providing a curated portfolio of high-quality scientific libraries and tools, PESO enables accelerated scientific advances for applications that depend on the capabilities we provide. PESO also provides a mechanism for the scientific community to engage with the developers of these libraries and tools, to give feedback and influence the direction of their development.
The PESO Project is led by the leadership team from the DOE Exascale Computing Project (ECP) Software Technology (ST) Focus Area and by the key technical leaders of Spack, E4S, and the Software Development Toolkits (SDKs).
As part of ECP efforts, we facilitated the work of about 250 scientists from DOE labs, universities, and partner commercial software companies to create a first-of-a-kind software ecosystem for scientific software sponsored by DOE. The team has also been heavily involved in the IDEAS Project, the Better Scientific Software (BSSw) project, Sustainable Research Pathways (SRP), and more — building a vibrant community around the productive and sustainable creation and use of software to advance scientific discovery in service of the DOE mission.
PESO intends to participate in the extension and expansion of software-ecosystem sustainment, continuing the success that ECP started.
The problem space
Every team building on scientific software hits the same wall eventually. PESO exists to move that wall.
Without a shared ecosystem
- Installing 3rd-party libs breaks on dependency mismatches
- Version updates introduce breaking changes downstream
- New tools disrupt existing team workflows
- Portability across CPU/GPU is manually managed
- Build times balloon as projects grow
- Algorithms fall out of date, hurting performance and security
With PESO
- Curated, tested library portfolio via Spack + E4S
- Coordinated release and compatibility testing
- User- and developer-experience research baked in
- Community engagement as a first-order priority
- Direct line to CASS community expertise
- Shared investment across DOE, vendors, and academia
How we work
Through collaborations, PESO provides:
- Software stacks and infrastructure — testing, hardening, integration, distribution, and intermediate user support for a product, whether as its final destination, an early-access staging environment for pre-release versions, or both:
- Spack — assistance creating and expanding Spack capabilities for product build, testing, integration, and distribution.
- E4S — support for product integration and distribution in the Extreme-scale Scientific Software Stack (E4S), depending on a team’s distribution strategy.
- CI — continuous integration testing on a variety of commodity and emerging target vendor hardware/software stacks.
- Software quality improvement — assistance improving product compatibility with E4S community policies.
- Stakeholder engagement — opportunities for software teams and communities to engage with DOE, vendors, application communities, and cross-lab management.
- An annual all-teams workshop — bringing together product teams, stakeholders, and other key parties for planning and coordination.
PESO welcomes engagement at several levels:
- Individual product teams whose products would benefit DOE application users and facilities — ideally also participating in a compatible product community, typically a DOE-sponsored software stewardship organization (SSO).
- Software product communities (“spokes”) — new and established communities that define their own quality-driving policies, ideally compatible with E4S community policies where products distribute through E4S.
- Communities of practice organized around cross-cutting concerns — research software engineering training (e.g., IDEAS), community outreach (e.g., CSCCE strategies), software foundations (e.g., NumFOCUS, Linux Foundation), and workforce development (e.g., US RSE, BSSw Fellows, Sustainable Research Pathways).
And with stakeholders and partners directly:
- Application teams, coordinating delivery via E4S, containers, cloud, and facilities environments.
- DOE computing facilities, providing and supporting a full stack of DOE-sponsored libraries and tools via E4S, in collaboration with commercial E4S partners.
- Computer system vendors, ensuring DOE-sponsored libraries and tools are available as part of or complementary to vendor software.
- Commercial software providers, co-developing and supporting DOE-sponsored software for industry, US agencies, and international partners.
- US agencies, making DOE-sponsored software available to their users while assuring compatibility with their own software environments.
Principles
- Transparency — open governance policies and open access to Consortium artifacts.
- Diversity — cultivation of diverse participation and representation.
- Sustainability — long-term viability and growth of software, practices, and workforce.
- Innovation — responsiveness to stakeholder needs and technological evolution.
- Cooperation — working together to support the overall Consortium mission.
- Integrity — acting as a fair, trusted, and respected asset to the community.
Key activities
- Partnerships — leading efforts to foster a diverse and inclusive workforce with sustainable career paths; shepherding the Better Scientific Software Fellows Program and contributing to the leadership of the BSSw.io web portal.
- Services — software product management, integration, and delivery, plus software quality assurance and security.
- Products — delivery and support via Spack and E4S, including porting and testing platforms shared across product teams to ensure code stability and portability, and facilitating delivery of other products such as AI/ML libraries as needed by the HPC community.
Want to be part of this? See how to connect with PESO or meet the team.