libhpc Stage II: A Long-term Solution for the Usability, Maintainability and Sustainability of HPC Software

Libhpc aims to provide a framework for building, running and maintaining future-proof, sustainable HPC applications. Lack of reusability and portability has been a major barrier to adoption in HPC code, leading to significant loss in what is often the most creative output of a research project and one with the greatest potential to benefit the wider research community and the general public. Libhpc gives developers of HPC code a means of capturing and sharing their creativity with the whole HPC community. By providing a means for expressing application structure abstractly, libhpc enables HPC developers to share equivalent implementations for differing architectures via libhpc repositories. The same abstract structure also produces highly re-usable applications, which are easily adapted at and even during runtime to execute on widely different platforms, architectures and resource groups. We believe that libhpc will give the HPC community a "best-practice" reference for navigating the transition to virtual infrastructures which is now one of the principal requirements of both researchers and infrastructure providers, and could play a critical role in the development of an integrated e-infrastructure policy, supporting both HPC and data science, In libhpc2, we propose to create a production-ready environment from the prototype framework developed in libhpc. The libhpc 2 environment will include package-based installs, admin interfaces, a community component repository and DSL support; it will also support internet-scale networking. libhpc2 will also place a strong emphasis on stakeholder engagement, community building and skills development through responsive documentation, workshops and hackdays. We will aim to introduce libhpc 2 to two target domains, fluid dynamics and bioinformatics, through "hands-on" hack-days in which we will componentise domain software and publish it to libhpc repositories. We will also hold a workshop for infrastructure providers to ensure that infrastructure requirements are met and to encourage uptake and deployment on national infrastructures.

Libhpc2 will have impact on the following groups:
Developers
* Spectral/hp Element group, Imperial College London - Led by Professor Spencer Sherwin, the group have developed the Nektar++ Finite Element code in collaboration with Dr Mike Kirby at the University of Utah and are partners in the libhpc 2 project. They support a base of both academic and non-academic users and recognised the significant potential that libhpc offers to their code and its users from our joint work in the first phase of the libhpc project.

End-users
* National Heart and Lung Institute - The NHLI collaborate closely with Professor Spencer 's group to apply the Nektar++ methods to model vitally important areas of heart physiology including aortic blood flow and cardiac electrophysiology.
* McLaren Racing, develop world-class engineering solutions in a competitive racing environment. Through Professor Sherwin they are looking for easy optimisation of large-scale computations across multiple hardware resources and this has been demonstrated through the Libhpc/Nektar++ work undertaken so far.

A further group of identified end-user beneficiaries are from the Bioinformatics domain:
* Dr Sarah Butcher and the Imperial College London Bioinformatics Support Service provide support and computational resources to a wide group of bioinformatics researchers, students and research projects. The ability to provide tools to simplify the specification of complex pipelines while making more effective use of their resources is of great interest.
* Dr David Aanensen at Imperial College London develops pipelines to support use cases in infectious disease epidemiology and can gain from the ability to access faster execution and heterogeneous resources.
* Life Technologies provide Next Generation Sequencing technologies for which cost is decreasing and data volumes are increasing. In addition, the market is expanding from one where the end users are specialists with computing knowledge to include a much wider group of end users who may not have the skills to manage and operate large-scale HPC resources. Libhpc presents an ideal solution to these challenges with the framework's support for simplified job specification and the ability to target remote, heterogeneous resources.

e-Infrastructure Operators
* As well as representing a pathway to a large class of users Dr Butcher, as manager of the Imperial College London Bioinformatics Support Service, is responsible for maintaining an eco-system of methods and machines that provide the key infrastructure for the large community of Imperial College Life Science workers.
* The Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre is a leading European centre of expertise in advanced research, technology transfer and the provision of supercomputer services to academia and business.
* EPSRC and others have charged the Software Sustainability Institute with ensuring that software underpinning the UK's scientific research is developed in the most productive and sustainable manner. The SSI could clearly play a leading role in the development and maintenance of the UK research software repository or method cloud.