Webinar 048: Extreme-scale Scientific Software Stack (E4S)
Channel: IDEAS Productivity
Date: 2021-01-16

Presented by: Sameer Shende (University of Oregon and ParaTools), and David Honegger Rogers (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
Presented on: 2021-01-13

With the increasing complexity and diversity of the software stack and system architecture of high performance computing (HPC) systems, the traditional HPC community is facing a huge productivity challenge in software building, integration and deployment. Recently, this challenge has been addressed by new software build management tools such as Spack that enable seamless software building and integration. Container based solutions provide a versatile way to package software and are increasingly being deployed on HPC systems. The DOE Exascale Computing Project (ECP) Software Technology focus area is developing an HPC software ecosystem that will enable the efficient and performant execution of exascale applications. Through the Extreme-scale Scientific Software Stack (E4S), it is developing a curated, Spack-based, comprehensive and coherent software stack that will enable application developers to productively write highly parallel applications that can portably target diverse exascale architectures. E4S provides both source builds through the Spack platform and a set of containers that feature a broad collection of HPC software packages. E4S exists to accelerate the development, deployment, and use of HPC software, lowering the barriers for HPC and AI/ML users. It provides container images, build manifests, and turn-key, from-source builds of popular HPC software packages developed as Software Development Kits (SDKs). This effort includes a broad range of areas including programming models and runtimes (MPICH, Kokkos, RAJA, OpenMPI), development tools (TAU, PAPI), math libraries (PETSc, Trilinos), data and visualization tools (Adios, HDF5, Paraview), and compilers (LLVM), all available through the Spack package manager. The webinar will describe the community engagements and interactions that led to the many artifacts produced by E4S, and will introduce the E4S containers that are being deployed at the HPC systems at DOE national laboratories.

The presenters will discuss the recent efforts and techniques to improve software integration and deployment for HPC platforms, and describe recent collaborative work on reproducible workflows between E4S and the Pantheon project. Pantheon provides a set of working examples of end-to-end workflows using ECP apps, infrastructure and postprocessing, focused on common vis/analysis operations and workflows of interest to application scientists and show a video of the workflow.

For more information about the HPC Best Practices webinars, including slides and Q&A archives for this presentation, other presentations in the series, and a mailing list for announcements of future webinars, please visit https://ideas-productivity.org/events/hpc-best-practices-webinars/