Collaborative Research: PPoSS: Planning: Performance Scalability, Trust, and Reproducibility: A Community Roadmap to Robust Science in High-throughput Applications

This project is focused on a critical issue in computational science. As scientists in all fields increasingly rely on high-throughput applications (which combine multiple components into increasingly complex multi-modal workflows on heterogeneous systems), the increasing complexities of those applications hinder the scientists' ability to generate robust results. The project recruits a cross-disciplinary community working together to define, design, implement, and use a set of solutions for robust science. In so doing, the community defines a roadmap that enables high-throughput applications to withstand and overcome adverse conditions such as heterogeneous, unreliable architectures at all scales including extreme scale, rigorous testing under uncertainties, unexplainable algorithms (e.g., in machine learning), and black-box methods. The project's novelties are its comprehensive, cross-disciplinary study of high-throughput applications for robust scientific discovery from hardware and systems all the way to policies and practices.

Through three virtual mini-workshops called virtual world cafes, this project engages a community of scientists at campuses (through the Computing Alliance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions [CAHSI], the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computing [CASC], and the Southern California Earthquake Center [SCEC]), at national laboratories, and in industry. The scientists participate in defining scalability, trust, and reproductivity in an initial set of high-throughput applications; identifying a set of experimental practices that support the in-concert successful progress of these applications' workflows; advancing towards a vision of general hardware and software solutions for robust science by evaluating the generality and transferability of experimental practices and by identifying any missing parts; and defining a research agenda for the next-generation workflows.

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.