The National HPCC Software Exchange (NHSE)

The National HPCC Software Exchange (NHSE) is an Internet-accessible resource that will facilitate the exchange of software and information among research and computational scientists involved with High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) [13]. The purpose of the NHSE is to promote the development of discipline-oriented software and document repositories and of contributions to and use of such repositories by Grand Challenge teams, as well as by other members of the high performance computing community. The target audiences for the NHSE include HPCC application and computer scientists, users of government supercomputer centers, and potential industrial users. A prototype of the NHSE is accessible from a WWW browser at http://www.netlib.org/nse/.

The scope of the NHSE is software and software-related artifacts produced by and for the HPCC Program. Software-related artifacts include algorithms, specifications, designs, and software documentation. The following types of software are to be made available:

• Systems software and software tools. This category includes parallel processing tools such as parallel compilers, message-passing communication subsystems, and parallel monitors and debuggers.
• Data analysis and visualization tools.
• Basic building blocks for accomplishing common computational and communication tasks. These building blocks will be of high quality and transportable across platforms. Building blocks are meant to be used by Grand Challenge teams and other researchers in implementing programs to solve computational problems. Use of high-quality transportable components will speed implementation, as well as increase the reliability of computed results.
• Research codes that have been developed to solve difficult computational problems. Many of these codes will have been developed to solve specific problems and thus will not be reusable as is. Rather, they will serve as proofs of concept and as models for developing general-purpose reusable software for solving broader classes of problems. The development of this reusable software is expected to be undertaken by commercial companies, rather than by academic researchers.

Although the different disciplines will maintain their own software repositories, users should not need to access each of these repositories separately. Rather, the NHSE will provide a uniform interface to a virtual HPCC software repository which will be built on top of the distributed set of discipline-oriented repositories. The interface will assist the user in locating relevant resources and in retrieving these resources. A combined browse/search interface will allow the user to explore the various HPCC areas and become familiar with the available resources. A longer term goal of the NHSE is to provide users with domain-specific expert help in locating and understanding relevant resources.