PST Motivation and Development Plan

Most major supercomputer centers, including those operated by the the Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), provide critical resources and services to the user community. Nevertheless, because of disparate hardware and software systems at individual supercomputer sites, users must learn myriad center-specific software syntax and semantics to perform even the most mundane operations, such as archival data storage and job submission. Furthermore, as users pursue the larger and more complex computer simulations possible with advancing supercomputer hardware, batch job scripts and code become more complicated, and the user's need to maintain portable, site-independent routines is intensified. The fact that most users are trained in mathematical, physical, or engineering disciplines, rather than computer science or software system development, only compounds this problem.

The Practical Supercomputing Toolkit intends to mitigate problems associated with non-expert users making use of supercomputing facilities.

PST provides or will provide:

• a software system built from stand-alone layers which can be used as a full suite of routines or as a truncated system comprised of a subset of layers;
• open source policy to encourage development participation from users and client site administrators;
• unified internal/external documentation to simultaneously enhance usability and modifiability of source code;

• TUSC (Tools for Unification of SuperComputing): standards and utilities for a unified command-line interface for archive and job queue submission at all major U.S. supercomputer centers and other supported sites;
• SET (Source Editing Tools): routines to automate, simplify, and unify the process of preparing source code for execution;
• MD (Management and Documentation): suite of routines to install, update, maintain, and document the PST software;
• ACT (Application Cookbook Tools): a repository of problem- and user-specific sample code and tutorials to disseminate the experience of veteran users;

Read the Getting Started document for an overview and references to more documentation of why and how to download, install, configure and use PST.

The Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Office provides the initial funding for the development of the TUSC, SET, and MD layers of PST, primarily for the development of a uniform command-line interface for job submission and data archiving at the DoD Shared Resource Centers. The DoD Metacomputing Working Group provides logistical coordination to encourage the participation of the DoD centers. We especially thank Dr. Aram Kevorkian for his guidance and leadership.