Addressing the Challenge of Continuous Integration of Software at Department of Energy Facilities

A key aspect of the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Exascale Computing Project’s (ECP) continuous integration activities is ensuring that the software in development for exascale can efficiently be deployed at the facilities and that it properly blends with the facilities’ many software components.

As is commonly understood in the realm of high-performance computing, integration is very challenging: both the hardware and software are complex, with a huge amount of dependencies, and creating the associated essential healthy software ecosystem requires abundant testing.

This interview—conducted at the SC18 supercomputing conference in Dallas recently—features Dave Montoya, an R&D manager and a technical staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory. For ECP, he is involved in the continuous software integration effort at DOE facilities where exascale computers will be located.

Video Chat Notes

From left, At SC18 in Dallas, Mike Bernhardt speaks with Dave Montoya of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Montoya leads ECP’s software integration efforts at DOE facilities.

Making the very challenging continuous software integration process efficient and healthy [0:01:00]

The importance of vendors’ involvement and assistance [0:02:59]

How the effort is progressing [0:03:30]

The components of the project: continuous integration, security, good test machines, integration and deployment using the Spack tool [0:04:07]

How ECP brings innovation to the process [0:07:12]

A really good team [0:08:17]