Revisiting the E4S Software Ecosystem Upon Release of Version 22.02

03/30/22

Exascale Computing Project · Episode 94: Revisiting the E4S Software Ecosystem Upon Release of Version 22.02
Mike Heroux, Sandia National Laboratories, director of Software Technology, Exascale Computing Project

Mike Heroux of Sandia National Laboratories, ECP Software Technology director

Hi, and welcome. This is where we explore the efforts of the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Exascale Computing Project (ECP)—from the development challenges and achievements to the ultimate expected impact of exascale computing on society.

We’re returning to the subject of the Extreme-scale Scientific Software Stack (E4S), as the E4S project recently released version 22.02 and we want to discuss what it offers. E4S is an ongoing broad collection of software capabilities continually developed to address emerging scientific needs for the DOE community. The new release contains about 100 directly supported products and provides a subset of the ECP Software Technologies (ST) portfolio. The primary purpose of E4S v22.02 is to demonstrate the ECP software stack release approach.

To share some big-picture insights about the new release and E4S overall, ECP ST director Mike Heroux of Sandia National Laboratories joins us.

Our topics:  E4S in a nutshell; what E4S version 22.02 offers; E4S as an ongoing, emerging software ecosystem for scientific research; the broad platform compatibility of E4S, from laptops to supercomputers; the legacies of E4S via ECP; and the main takeaway about E4S.

Show Notes

E4S version 22.02 Description

“Exascale Computing Project (ECP) Software Technologies (ST) software, Extreme-scale Scientific Software Stack (E4S) v22.02, includes a subset of ECP ST software products, and demonstrates the target approach for future delivery of the full ECP ST software stack. Also available are a number of ECP ST software products that support a Spack package but are not yet fully interoperable. As the primary purpose of the v22.02 is demonstrating the ST software stack release approach, not all ECP ST software products were targeted for this release. Software products were targeted primarily based on existing Spack package maturity, location within the scientific software stack, and ECP SDK developer experience with the software. Each release will include additional software products, with the ultimate goal of including all ECP ST software products.” —E4S version 22.01 release notes

Memorable Quote

“ECP has provided us with an ambitious set of goals that required us to work together across labs, universities, industry partners to deliver software to exascale applications and to the broader scientific community. It is a big enough and large enough—and I would have to say, gnarly enough—problem that forced us and incentivized us to work together in this kind of portfolio way. We’ve been developing as a DOE scientific community lots of these products; these are not generally brand-new products. They’re brand-new capabilities that are targeting the exascale systems.” —Mike Heroux, senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories and director of the ECP ST research focus area

Discussion Flow

E4S as an ongoing collection of software capabilities addressing DOE science needs (2:42)

A rundown of what E4S version 22.02 contains (5:13)

The emerging nature of E4S as a software ecosystem (8:53)

An ecosystem for developers who are not working on the “bleeding edge” (10:32)

E4S legacies enabled by ECP (11:29)

The main takeaway about E4S for the scientific community (13:28)

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