A Platform for Scientific Application Dissemination and Community Engagement

This project enhances and commercializes a Web service that “shrink wraps” complex high- performance-computing energy applications for easy and broad use in industry and research. Such broad use has long been inhibited by tool complexity and by the fact that simulation and data analysis tools require complex pre- and post-processing and workflow orchestration. Tedious tool installation procedures and complex parallel platform and data management needs add further impediments to technology transfer and industrial adoption. How this problem will be addressed. Parallel Works Inc. has created a Web-based platform to encapsulate the entire process of using scientific and engineering modeling, simulation and analysis tools into shrink-wrapped software procedures. These automated procedures perform the higher-level workflow involved in using software applications, from installation to data preparation to procedure specification, execution, iteration and optimization. They address analysis, visualization, collaboration, assessment, publication and dissemination. The proposed innovation research enables this platform to create for scientific applications what iOS and Android have achieved for mobile applications: a thriving marketplace where developers create and sell highly usable, broadly adopted high-value HPC solutions for industrial customers. Proposed Innovation. The proposed Phase I R&D creates two key innovations to power the marketplace. A revolutionary and highly productive snap-together software “fabric” enables scientific software tools to be quickly and easily assembled into complete solutions that are far easier to use and adapt. And a framework of relocatable parallel computing workspaces enables workflows with all their required components to be easily installed and executed at significant scales on elastic HPC computing resources from public providers and customer systems. The innovations integrate components from SciDAC and DOE research to go far beyond what’s possible today. SBIR strategy. In Phase I, the focus will be on development and evaluation of a prototype fabric and workspace; conducting applied research on key problems of expressivity and IDE interactivity (for productive scripting); and on achieving transparency between HPC and cloud resource providers. Specific high-value applications such as NEK5000 and LAMMPS will be used as initial test cases, along apps for subsurface modeling and multiphase flow used in coal gasification research. Phase I research will develop the community engagement marketing roadmap for Phase II and subsequent productization efforts. Commercial applications and other benefits. The research proposed in this SBIR has the potential to revolutionize and expand the practice of simulation across multiple tiers of manufacturing and product design across the entire energy sector and environmental cleanup industry. It will create powerful ways to translate product and process design research into industrial productivity. The solutions derived from this research into application dissemination will drive efficiency in firms ranging from small engineering teams to large global manufacturing and energy enterprises, and to industries that extend beyond energy into automotive, aerospace, biomedical, pharmaceutical and consumer goods.