Packaging PETSc for Commercialization

Millions of dollars have been spent on the development of numerical software libraries within the Departement of Energy. While they are used extensively in academia and government, their adoption into industrial codes is less prevalent. The cutting ede capabilities offered by these packages, however, could have a broad and sizable impact in industrial R & amp;D since it is prohibitively expensive for a coompany to implement improved algorithms in their codes that are otherwise avaialbe in a library solution. The limited presence of these codes in industry is mostly due to their cmoplex delivery system, their usability, and their lack of true engineering-standard quality assurance. The focus on a particular numerical software library, the Portable Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PETSc) from Argonne National Laboratory. PETSc has been used in the scientific community for over 20 years and at present is downloaded over 300 times per month. Nonetheless theire is still a desire for a set of single-click installers that commercial customers can use for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux systems. Previously, at the ASCR Workshop for Indsutry Software Developers in March 2011, it was found that one of the impediments to adoption of DOE software in industry is the lack of effective software delivery. In the Phase I, on of the deliverables will be a set of single-click installers for PETSc for a variety of configureations. This project will address the issue of verification by testing againt MATLAB, a well-tested numerical software package with approximately a million users in industry and academia. We will also desing an expanded tutorial system aimed at industry users. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits: The immediate commercial application is a numerical library that can be easily installed on a variety of systems and used in commercial software packages, as well as software packages from industrial leaders. We will offer these pre-built, single-click PETSc libraries for sale and leverage these sales to obtain consulting contracts. We will also offer unique solutions only possible with Tech-X expertise in computational mathematics and GPU programming. In Phase II and beyond, we will investigate further consulting opportunities and investigate new possibilities for fronting PETSc with a GUI to create a more attractive design environment that can compete with other industry leaders. Tech-X currently has a pre- and post- processing tool, called Composer, that is used in a number of settings and could eventually be offered on top of PETSc. We expect that this would produce an atractive tool alongside the pre-built libraries.