In our last meeting it was suggested that having the equivalent of a mission/vision and/or key tenets might be useful to both help summarize the effort publicly, and provide background motivation as we continue
discussing relevant conventions and the component selection process. To have some starting bullets to discuss, I wanted to send the following out before tomorrow's TSC meeting. The first "mission" statement is pasted directly from the OpenHPC charter/participation
agreement that we iterated on. The Vision/Values bullets that follow are some draft ideas.
Thanks,
-k
Mission:
create a stable and flexible open source high performance computing (“HPC”) software stack, validated to run on a variety of hardware platforms;
increase the simplicity and to reduce the cost of deploying and managing HPC systems and the performance and efficient utilization of HPC systems;
include insights and technical contributions from across the HPC ecosystem, to integrate the leading edge work in the field and make it available to the community, and to adapt to new hardware insights and new technologies addressing scalability and performance,
quickly responding to technology changes; and
host the infrastructure for the open source project, establishing a neutral home for community meetings, events and collaborative discussions and providing structure around the business and technical governance of the Project.
Vision:
To provide a collection of pre-packaged binary components that, when combined with a supported base operating system, can be used to install and manage HPC systems throughout their lifecycle. Components should range
across the entire HPC software ecosystem including provisioning, resource management, system health tools, development tools, runtimes, and userspace libraries.
To foster a nimble release cycle capable of supporting relevant new hardware configurations in a timely fashion
To provide additional distribution/integration mechanisms for leading research groups releasing open-source software
To support target usage for Top500 class systems, but maintain flexibility for usage on smaller systems with example installation recipes
To allow and promote multiple system configuration recipes that leverage community reference designs
To foster identification and development relevant interfaces between supported components that allows for simple component replacement and customization
Key Values:
component interoperability
system stability
performance scalability
community collaboration
traceability
transparency
knowledge base for configuration recipes
focus on user experience and convenience (for both system administrators and end-users)
