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The 2GCHAS: A high productivity software development environment

To the user, the most visible feature of the Transportable Applications Executive (TAE) is its very powerful user interface. To the programmer, TAE's user interface, proc concept, standardized interface definitions, and hierarchy search provide a set of tools for rapidly prototyping or developing production software. The 2GCHAS (Second Generation Comprehensive Helicopter Analysis System) project has extended and enhanced these mechanisms, creating a powerful and high productivity programming environment where the 2GCHAS development environment is 2GCHAS itself and where a sustained rate for certified, documented, and tested software above 30 delivered source instructions per programmer day has been achieved. The 2GCHAS environment is not limited to helicopter analysis, but is applicable to other disciplines where software development is important.

Babb, Larry↗

Building and Sustaining a Community Resource for Best Practices in Scientific Software: The Story of BSSw.io

The development of scientific software—a cornerstone of long-term collaboration and scientific progress—parallels the development of other types of software but still poses distinct challenges, especially in high-performance computing. Although web searches yield numerous resources on software engineering, there is still a scarcity specifically for scientific software development. Here, this article introduces the Better Scientific Software site (https://bssw.io), a platform that hosts a community of researchers, developers, and practitioners who share their experiences and insights on scientific software development. Since 2017, this collaborative hub has gained traction within the scientific computing community, attracting a growing number of readers and contributors eager to share ideas and elevate their software development practices. In sharing the BSSw.io site’s story, we hope to encourage further growth of the BSSw.io community through both readership and contributors, with a long-term goal of fostering culture change by increasing emphasis on best practices in scientific software.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Recent Developments and Challenges Implementing New and Improved Stress Intensity Factor (K) Solutions in NASGRO for Damage Tolerance Analyses

Fatigue crack growth analysis software has been available to damage tolerance analysts for many years in either commercial products or via proprietary in-house codes. The NASGRO software has been publicly available since the mid-80s (known as NASA/FLAGRO up to 1999) and since 2000 has been sustained and further developed by a collaborative effort between Southwest Research Institute® (SwRI®), the NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC), and the members of the NASGRO Industrial Consortium. Since the stress intensity factor (K) is the foundation of fracture mechanics and damage tolerance analysis of aircraft structures, a significant focus of development efforts in the past fifteen years has been geared towards enhancing legacy K solutions and developing new and efficient numerical K solutions that can handle the complicated stress gradients computed by today’s analysts using detailed finite element models of fatigue critical locations. This paper provides an overview of K solutions that have been recently implemented or improved for the analysis of geometries such as two unequal through cracks at a hole and two unequal corner cracks at a hole, as well as state-of-the-art weight function models capable of computing K in the presence of univariant and/or bivariant stress gradients and complicated residual stress distributions. Some historical background is provided to review how common K solutions have evolved over the years, including selective examples from the literature and from new research. Challenges and progress in rectifying discrepancies between older legacy solutions and newer models are reviewed as well as approaches and challenges for verification and validation of K solutions. Finally, a summary of current challenges and future research and development needs is presented. A key theme throughout the presentation of this paper will be how members of the aerospace industry have collaborated with software developers to develop a practical analysis tool that is used world-wide to support new design as well as the ongoing sustainment and airworthiness of commercial and military aircraft.

Cardinal, Joseph W.↗

OpenFAST [SWR-08-12]

OpenFAST is a wind turbine simulation tool which builds on NREL's FAST v8 software. NREL's FAST.Farm software extends the capability of OpenFAST to simulate multi-turbine wind farms. They were created with the goal of being community models developed and used by research laboratories, academia, and industry. They are managed by a dedicated team at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Our objective is to ensure that OpenFAST and FAST.Farm are sustainable software that are well tested and well documented. If you'd like to contribute, see the Developer Documentation and any open GitHub issues with the Help Wanted tag.

Jonkman, Jason↗

LLNL Response to the DOE ASCR RFI, "Stewardship of Software for Scientific and High-Performance Computing"

For decades, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has been engaged in significant research, development, and support for software to enable scientific computing and, particularly, the use of high performance computing (HPC) in the NNSA mission space. In particular, the move in the mid-1990’s to simulation as a leading component of stockpile stewardship through the ASCI and the successor ASC programs, as well as the need for reliable data acquisition and control software for the National Ignition Facility, have been important drivers in building expertise in production-quality software development at LLNL. LLNL has also been a leader in the DOE SciDAC FASTMath Institute and the DOE Exascale Computing Project (ECP), both of which have striven to make scientific computing software – in particular, the enabling technologies underpinning simulation capabilities – more widely adopted and sustainable. As such, we believe that our experience can inform the broader goal of software stewardship for scientific and high-performance computing. LLNL strongly supports the formation of a new DOE ASCR program element in software stewardship and sustainment. Historically, DOE ASCR has funded applied mathematics and computer science research that has led to the development of important new capabilities and algorithms that are expressed as artifacts in research software. Such frameworks, libraries, and tools have seldom been directly funded to address the important issues of code maintenance, documentation, robustness, and community building. Software engineering and support have typically been done on the side in support of the ASCR-driven research products. DOE funding priorities have been slow to recognize that good software engineering, the kind that ensures research investments have more adoption and longevity, requires significant resources. Based upon our experiences, we have prepared this response to highlight the concerns and issues we believe to be important as DOE ASCR considers its role in scientific software stewardship. We believe that role is important and will require a significant investment of new funding to legitimately support the technologies past and future DOE ASCR investments have and will produce to facilitate their uptake and adoption in the broader scientific computing community. Following a summary of our involvement in scientific software development, the remainder our response is organized around the nine topics specifically identified in the RFI.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

WTEC Panel Report on International Assessment of Research and Development in Simulation-Based Engineering and Science

This WTEC panel report assesses the international research and development activities in the field of Simulation- Based Engineering and Science (SBE&S). SBE&S involves the use of computer modeling and simulation to solve mathematical formulations of physical models of engineered and natural systems. SBE&S today has reached a level of predictive capability that it now firmly complements the traditional pillars of theory and experimentation/observation. As a result, computer simulation is more pervasive today – and having more impact – than at any other time in human history. Many critical technologies, including those to develop new energy sources and to shift the cost-benefit factors in healthcare, are on the horizon that cannot be understood, developed, or utilized without simulation. A panel of experts reviewed and assessed the state of the art in SBE&S as well as levels of activity overseas in the broad thematic areas of life sciences and medicine, materials, and energy and sustainability; and in the crosscutting issues of next generation hardware and algorithms; software development; engineering simulations; validation, verification, and uncertainty quantification; multiscale modeling and simulation; and SBE&S education. The panel hosted a U.S. baseline workshop, conducted a bibliometric analysis, consulted numerous experts and reports, and visited 59 institutions and companies throughout East Asia and Western Europe to explore the active research projects in those institutions, the computational infrastructure used for the projects, the funding schemes that enable the research, the collaborative interactions among universities, national laboratories, and corporate research centers, and workforce needs and development for SBE&S.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Sustaining and Extending the Open Science Grid: Science Innovation on a PetaScale Nationwide Facility (DE-FC02-06ER41436) SciDAC-2 Closeout Report

Under this SciDAC-2 grant the project’s goal w a s t o stimulate new discoveries by providing scientists with effective and dependable access to an unprecedented national distributed computational facility: the Open Science Grid (OSG). We proposed to achieve this through the work of the Open Science Grid Consortium: a unique hands-on multi-disciplinary collaboration of scientists, software developers and providers of computing resources. Together the stakeholders in this consortium sustain and use a shared distributed computing environment that transforms simulation and experimental science in the US. The OSG consortium is an open collaboration that actively engages new research communities. We operate an open facility that brings together a broad spectrum of compute, storage, and networking resources and interfaces to other cyberinfrastructures, including the US XSEDE (previously TeraGrid), the European Grids for ESciencE (EGEE), as well as campus and regional grids. We leverage middleware provided by computer science groups, facility IT support organizations, and computing programs of application communities for the benefit of consortium members and the US national CI.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Lightweight Software Process Improvement Using Productivity and Sustainability Improvement Planning (PSIP)

Productivity and Sustainability Improvement Planning (PSIP) is a lightweight, iterative workflow that allows software development teams to identify development bottlenecks and track progress to overcome them. In this paper, we present an overview of PSIP and how it compares to other software process improvement (SPI) methodologies, and provide two case studies that describe how the use of PSIP led to successful improvements in team effectiveness and efficiency.

Heroux, Michael A.↗

NESTA: NASA Engineering Shuttle Telemetry Agent

The Spaceport Processing Systems Branch at NASA Kennedy Space Center has developed and deployed an agent based tool to monitor the Space Shuttle's ground processing telemetry stream. The application, the NASA Engineering Shuttle Telemetry Agent, increases situational awareness for system and hardware engineers during ground processing of the Shuttle's subsystems. The agent provides autonomous monitoring of the telemetry stream and automatically alerts system engineers when predefined criteria have been met. Efficiency and safety are improved through increased automation. Sandia National Labs' Java Expert System Shell is employed as the rule engine. The shell's predicate logic lends itself well to capturing the heuristics and specifying the engineering rules of this spaceport domain. The declarative paradigm of the rule-based agent yields a highly modular and scalable design spanning multiple subsystems of the Shuttle. Several hundred monitoring rules have been written thus far with corresponding notifications sent to Shuttle engineers. This paper discusses the rule-based telemetry agent used for Space Shuttle ground processing and explains the problem domain, development of the agent software, benefits of AT technology, and deployment and sustaining engineering of the product.

Semmel, Glenn S.↗

Quantum Computing Strategy 2026

Quantum computing (QC) is a rapidly maturing technology with the potential for revolutionary impacts on stockpile stewardship science and national security. Recent developments in fault-tolerant architectures have compressed vendor roadmaps, and predictions of a production-ready quantum computer by the mid-2030s are becoming increasingly credible. This strategy provides a roadmap for integrating QC into the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program by investing in four strategic focus areas: 1. Develop Capabilities in Mission-Relevant Quantum Applications: ASC will prioritize developing quantum-ready applications in mission areas that have shown significant promise for quantum advantage, including simulations of materials in extreme environments, nuclear dynamics, solving linear and nonlinear partial differential equations, and uncertainty quantification. These applications directly support stockpile stewardship science and modernization objectives. 2. Conduct R&D in Algorithms, Software, and Hardware: Sustained research into quantum algorithms, robust software tools, and quantum hardware is essential. ASC will develop efficient quantum algorithms; invest in quantum compilers, debuggers, and performance tools; and explore specialized quantum hardware tailored to NNSA’s unique requirements. 3. Engage with Vendors and Partners: Early and active collaboration with commercial quantum hardware vendors and academic partners is critical. Through testbeds, co-design agreements, and quantum demonstration facilities, ASC will influence hardware design, gain early access to emerging technologies, and ensure that quantum platforms evolve to meet mission needs. 4. Build Knowledge, Experience, and Workforce: Expanding and upskilling the quantum-trained workforce is essential to long-term success. This includes hiring, internal training, university outreach, and postdoctoral support to ensure ASC maintains the expertise required to operate, program, and integrate quantum systems as they become available. While quantum computing will never replace classical computing, it has the potential to solve certain problems with speed and accuracy that would be unachievable using any conceivable classical high-performance computing (HPC) system. By investing strategically in QC, ASC will help propel the emergent QC industry, maintain U.S. technological leadership, ensure mission readiness, and position itself to rapidly adopt quantum technologies as they mature.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Light Water Reactor Sustainability Program: Upgrade of EMRALD to a Modern JavaScript-based Framework

Event Modeling Risk Assessment using Linked Diagrams (EMRALD) is a software tool developed at Idaho National Laboratory for researching the capabilities of dynamic probabilistic risk assessment. It provides a simple interface to represent complex interactions often seen when developing dynamic models. EMRALD can also interface with other applications by modifying inputs, running, and using their results within EMRALD for dynamic and integrated assessment. This report goes over the work performed as part of the Risk-Informed Systems Analysis Pathway under the Light Water Reactor Sustainability program to upgrade the EMRALD software.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

TPSAS-NF1676L-32493-DND

The Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) System Engineering Office (SEO) has supported the Open Data Cube (ODC) initiative to provide a data architecture solution that has value to its global users and increases the impact of EO satellite data. ODC is an open-source platform for processing satellite data. We have developed software products and tools around the core ODC that would help users perform machine learning on EO satellite data. The recent United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Agenda provides a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and for the planet, considering our current situation and helping to create a plan. The core of this agenda is a set of seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which represent an urgent call for action by all countries - both developed and developing - in a global partnership. The CEOS SEO team has recently developed and released a set of innovative Jupyter notebooks addressing UN SDGs 6.6.1 (spatial extents of water-related ecosystems), 11.3.1 (ratio of land consumption rate to population growth rate), and 15.3.1 (proportion of land that is degraded over total land area). These notebooks empower users by providing features that will assist with streamlining analysis ready data retrieval, processing, and visualization. We have recently incorporated several machine learning techniques in these notebooks. In this paper, we present the lessons learned from our experience on classifying land using supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques using ODC framework for UN SDGs. We identify the current limitations of ODC to seamlessly support machine learning techniques. We propose features that would help machine learning, specifically within the ODC framework. We propose a thematic indexing/loading of data for both unsupervised learning as well as data annotation/labeling pipeline. Currently, ODC supports machine learning by separating data-management from the analysis process. It works as a mechanism to load cubes of data. ODC does not natively support features that are vital in machine learning such as validation splits, fair/balanced sampling, establishing load size constraints, etc. We believe that our proposed features will empower users by providing features that bring machine learning techniques closed to ODC. Enhancements to ODC to better accommodate machine learning techniques can assist in fulfilling UN SDGs such as 6.3.2, 6.4.2, 6.6.1, 11.3.1, 14.1.1, 15.1.1, 15.3.1, and 15.4.2.

Syed R Rizvi↗

Component based development of computer-aided tools for different applications

Computer-aided methods and tools are used at different stages of chemical process development. However new tools are needed to meet the current and future challenges through innovative and more sustainable solutions that the currently available tools may not be able to provide. This work focuses on component-based software architecture for development of tailor-made computer-aided tools for specific application objectives. The architecture is based on “components”, which can be model-objects that are stored in a library; collection of property models; databases; numerical solvers; design-algorithms (work-flows) etc. Furthermore, the main idea of these components is to incorporate a plug & play framework, where for a specific purpose, after the work-flow and associated data-flow are established, a specific computer-aided tool can be configured through a library of software components. Also, through the use of software components that are based on predictive model-based solution techniques, the final software can be reliably used to provide innovative and more sustainable solutions over a wide range of problems.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

xSDK Foundations: Toward an Extreme-scale Scientific Software Development Kit

Here, extreme-scale computational science increasingly demands multiscale and multiphysics formulations. Combining software developed by independent groups is imperative: no single team has resources for all predictive science and decision support capabilities. Scientific libraries provide high-quality, reusable software components for constructing applications with improved robustness and portability. However, without coordination, many libraries cannot be easily composed. Namespace collisions, inconsistent arguments, lack of third-party software versioning, and additional difficulties make composition costly. The Extreme-scale Scientific Software Development Kit (xSDK) defines community policies to improve code quality and compatibility across independently developed packages (hypre, PETSc, SuperLU, Trilinos, and Alquimia) and provides a foundation for addressing broader issues in software interoperability, performance portability, and sustainability. The xSDK provides turnkey installation of member software and seamless combination of aggregate capabilities, and it marks first steps toward extreme-scale scientific software ecosystems from which future applications can be composed rapidly with assured quality and scalability.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Crew Exercise Fact Sheet

Johnson Space Center (JSC) provides research, engineering, development, integration, and testing of hardware and software technologies for exercise systems applications in support of human spaceflight. This includes sustaining the current suite of on-orbit exercise devices by reducing maintenance, addressing obsolescence, and increasing reliability through creative engineering solutions. Advanced exercise systems technology development efforts focus on the sustainment of crew's physical condition beyond Low Earth Orbit for extended mission durations with significantly reduced mass, volume, and power consumption when compared to the ISS.

Rafalik, Kerrie↗

Crew Exercise

Johnson Space Center (JSC) provides research, engineering, development, integration, and testing of hardware and software technologies for exercise systems applications in support of human spaceflight. This includes sustaining the current suite of on-orbit exercise devices by reducing maintenance, addressing obsolescence, and increasing reliability through creative engineering solutions. Advanced exercise systems technology development efforts focus on the sustainment of crew's physical condition beyond Low Earth Orbit for extended mission durations with significantly reduced mass, volume, and power consumption when compared to the ISS.

Rafalik, Kerrie K.↗

PVMapper: Report on the Second Public Opinion Survey

This report has been developed as an integral part of the PVMapper project, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s SunShot program. The objective of the SunShot program is to reduce the total costs of solar energy systems. The scope of PVMapper is to develop a geographic information system (GIS) based project planning tool to identify optimal utility-scale solar facility sites. The specific objectives of the project are to 1) develop the software on an open-source platform; 2) integrate the appropriate data sets and GIS layers; 3) include a measure of social risk and public acceptance; 4) enable customization of variable weights; 5) provide a free and accessible platform for software download; and 6) provide a sustainability plan to ensure future relevance of the software. When completed, PVMapper is intended to be used by solar developers, Authorities Having Jurisdiction (AHJs), and other interested parties. This project supports SunShot’s objective by reducing the non-hardware balance of system costs (“soft costs”) for utility-scale solar project development. In order to accomplish the third project objective – including a measure of social risk and public acceptance within PVMapper – the project team has developed a time-series public opinion survey, administered yearly over the course of the three-year project. This report highlights the results and preliminary analyses from the second survey in this series. While the results of this survey are valuable to both PVMapper and future utility-scale solar development, the time-series design is extremely important. The completion of the series enables the extension of the dataset to much richer information. For example, the research team altered this iteration to sharpen the focus on specific topics (those posing potentially higher risks) and target specific locations in the oversample (such as communities near existing facilities). Using similar approaches for each iteration leads to an increasingly greater amount of detail regarding siting risks. The need for this extended dataset to aid in siting utility-scale solar projects is evident, as developers continue to scale back initial plans due to unidentified or incorrectly quantified social risks. It should be noted that this report provides the complete dataset from the survey, encompassing the wide-ranging responses from all of the survey questions. Although the methods used to integrate these data into PVMapper’s siting algorithms is not the purpose of this report, allusions to integration can be found in the discussions surrounding the design of questions and types of data to be used.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Sustainability and Reproducibility via Containerized Computing

Recent developments in the commercial open source community have catalysed the use of Linux containers for scalable deployment of web-based applications to the cloud. Scientific software can be containerized with dependencies, configuration files, post-processing tools and even simulation results, referred to as containerized computing. This new approach promises to significantly improve sustainability, productivity and reproducibility. In this article, we present our experiences, technology, and future plans for open source containerization of software used to model particle and radiation beams. Vagrant is central to our approach, using Docker for cloud deployment and VirtualBox virtual machines for deployment to Mac OS and Windows computers. Our technology enables seamless switching between the desktop and the cloud to simplify simulation development and execution.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗