Sustaining Research Software: an SC18 Panel

TL;DR

This paper discusses the importance of sustaining research software amid evolving technology and user needs, highlighting the tension between software performance and sustainability, and sharing insights from a panel at SC18 to guide future research infrastructure decisions.

Contribution

It presents a summary of discussions from the SC18 panel on research software sustainability, emphasizing the trade-offs with performance and proposing directions for future research and infrastructure planning.

Findings

Sustainability is crucial for ongoing research software utility.

There is a significant trade-off between software performance and sustainability.

Community discussions can inform better infrastructure choices for research software.

Abstract

Many science advances have been possible thanks to the use of research software, which has become essential to advancing virtually every Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) discipline and many non-STEM disciplines including social sciences and humanities. And while much of it is made available under open source licenses, work is needed to develop, support, and sustain it, as underlying systems and software as well as user needs evolve. In addition, the changing landscape of high-performance computing (HPC) platforms, where performance and scaling advances are ever more reliant on software and algorithm improvements as we hit hardware scaling barriers, is causing renewed tension between sustainability of software and its performance. We must do more to highlight the trade-off between performance and sustainability, and to emphasize the need for sustainability given the fact that complex software stacks don't survive without frequent maintenance; made more difficult as a generation of developers of established and heavily-used research software retire. Several HPC forums are doing this, and it has become an active area of funding as well. In response, the authors organized and ran a panel at the SC18 conference. The objectives of the panel were to highlight the importance of sustainability, to illuminate the tension between pure performance and sustainability, and to steer SC community discussion toward understanding and addressing this issue and this tension. The outcome of the discussions, as presented in this paper, can inform choices of advance compute and data infrastructures to positively impact future research software and future research.