Collaborative Research: Sustainability: A Community-Centered Approach for Supporting and Sustaining Parsl

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

Modern research computing requires orchestration of complex computational workflows across diverse research computing infrastructure. To meet this requirement, Parsl, an open source software package, enables scientists and engineers to parallelize Python programs and run them scalably and efficiently on small to very large local and remote resources (e.g., laptops, clusters, clouds, and supercomputers), while also moving data as needed. Parsl effectively democratizes access to NSF's increasingly broad and powerful cyberinfrastructure resources by enabling researchers to work in the familiar and productive Python programming language and environment while also allowing them to easily scale and distribute their work to fully use today's cutting-edge cyberinfrastructure. Parsl is a key tool used by researchers to tackle some of the world's most significant challenges: from understanding the beginning of the universe to exploring an enormous molecular search space to identify viable therapeutics. This project is laying the foundation for the sustainability of this crucial tool, enabling new long-term science advances and thereby benefiting society. Participation in several education programs is exposing a diverse group of students to the increasingly important area of parallel and distributed computing. This project is transitioning Parsl to a community-governed and community-supported open source project, with future income to be managed by a nonprofit organization under the direction of an elected Parsl Coordination Committee. The project is delivering a sustainable Parsl community by a) targeted technical activities that reduce costs and barriers for contribution, reducing future maintenance costs; b) building the Parsl community via outreach, engagement, and education programs, increasing potential future contributors; and c) establishing pathways and incentives to convert users to contributors and contributors to leaders, growing the next generation of the community. The project takes a data-driven approach by measuring effort and funding across the project to reveal insights about where effort is spent, how it is supported, and how these factors can be balanced. The lessons learned in this project are being converted to a blueprint for similar projects. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.