Project Title
Improving the Usability and Effectiveness of the ACTS Toolkit
Project Homepage
http://acts.nersc.gov
Participants
NERSC (Brent Milne,
John Wu,
Bill Saphir)
Objective
The goal of our project is to improve the effectiveness and usability of
ACTS
tools.
Some of our specific goals are to:
-
Provide effective and uniform support. By increasing the quality of support
and the quality of information about the ACTS tools, and in particular
by increasing the number of ACTS success stories, we will increase the
credibility of the tools.
-
Increase tool visibility. The strategic placement of on-line literature
will make more potential users aware of ACTS and its capabilities.
-
Provide reviews of ACTS components. By providing quality reviews, we will
increase user confidence in and understanding of the tools.
-
Contribute a user-oriented perspective to new development efforts, such
as the Common Component Architecture (CCA) and Equation Solver Interface
(ESI) groups.
-
Reduce the risk of using ACTS tools. By providing direct and aggressive
support for the tools, we can allay concerns about committing to use a
tool.
-
Provide a buffer between users and developers. Lack of such a buffer is
a fundamental barrier to growth. NERSC is in a position te provide support
to a larger number of users and ease the burden on developers.
Approach
This ongoing project extends the role of NERSC to include special support
of ACTS and other experimental software. The NERSC effort is concentrated
in three areas.
-
Technical support. NERSC facilitates the use of ACTS components
by providing specialized consulting services for new and advanced users,
providing documentation and training for ACTS components, identifying potential
ACTS users and promoting ACTS tools where appropriate.
-
Increased availability and stability. Where appropriate, NERSC will
install and maintain current versions of ACTS components on NERSC platforms,
porting when necessary.
-
Evaluation. NERSC evaluates the performance, robustness, functionality,
and overall usability of ACTS components. NERSC then provides the evaluation
results to users, so that they make informed choices, and to developers,
so that they can improve the tools. As an independent third party to most
of the tools, NERSC is in a position to provide "consumer reports" style
information.
The NERSC effort takes on pro-active as well as advisory roles in its interactions
with both users and developers. Actively working with application programmers
to use toolkit components is critical to NERSC's ability to accurately
judge tool effectiveness. Such work is also critical to our role in the
cycle of tool development, use, feedback, and improvement. NERSC also seeks
to work actively with developers to improve or extend tools to meet application
and hardware specific needs that arise within the NERSC user community.
A key element in NERSC's advisory activities is its maintenance of a
centralized ACTS information site on the World Wide Web. All information
(documentation, evaluation, etc.) made available to NERSC users is placed
on the Web so that it is accessible outside of NERSC. This includes information
about how to obtain and install the software.
In a natural extension to these efforts, NERSC will also track continuing
developments on toolkit wide infrastructure and interoperability efforts
(such as those of the CCA and ESI groups) and provide input to these development
groups to reflect the needs of the NERSC user community.
Accomplishments
Online ACTS Information Center
In August 1998, we unveiled the ACTS information center on the World Wide
Web at http://acts.nersc.gov/. This
site contains overviews, introductory information about each tool, preliminary
evaluations, and instructions on where to get software and technical assistance.
Training
We have provided ACTS Toolkit tutorials at four separate NERSC user training
sessions, at LBNL and remote sites.
Support
Four ACTS Tools are now officially installed and supported on the NERSC
T3E - Aztec, PETSc,
ScaLAPACK
and
TAU. Others are installed but
have not been advanced to the level of "official support" including Global
Arrays, Globus, POOMA, and PVODE.
Aztec, PETSc, and Tau have also been installed on the NERSC PC Cluster
testbed, and will be part of a plug-and-play cluster environment distributed
by NERSC to NERSC users and other researchers.
Applications
Intensive support has been provided in an effort to parallelize a legacy
fluidized reactor bed code (MFIX) allowing the replacement custom serial
components with components taken from the ACTS Toolkit (PETSc and Aztec).
This work will result in a detailed evaluation and comparison of PETSc
and Aztec. We are also investigating the possibility of using PVODE to
replace the code's built-in stiff nonlinear integrator.
Additional direct support has been provided to current NERSC users of
Aztec, CUMULVS, Globus and PETSc.
Prospective users of the ACTS Toolkit have been selected through a careful
reading of all current ERCAP proposals, and these users have been sorted
and categorized according to their potential for benefit from tool use.
We have now begun to systematically contact these users in an attempt to
encourage them to use the toolkit and to foster collaborations with our
support effort.
Other efforts
We have worked directly with both the Globus development team and a group
of NERSC users to evaluate the suitability of Globus to provide transparent
remote access to the NERSC T3E. As part of this effort, ported the Globus
gatekeeper to the NERSC T3E/Unicos production environment. A demonstration
at the SC'98 demonstrated the possibility of using Globus to transparently
start remote T3E jobs.
Responding to user interest, we investigated the CUMULVS tool and other
issues (scheduling, security, machine management) related to remote steering
and management of T3E jobs.
We have begun to participate in the Common Component Architecture (CCA)
and Equation Solver Interface (ESI) groups. These efforts are likely to
lead to the next generation of parallel tools, and will be the direct descendants
of ACTS efforts.
Future Plans
Now that baseline support for ACTS tools has been established at NERSC,
ongoing ACTS Toolkit support can be seen as two related but distinct activities.
-
Ongoing maintenance and enhancement of the basic support infrastructure,
including the tracking of new tool developments.
-
Systematically identifying and evaluating new candidate user applications
and working with these users to integrate ACTS tools into their codes.
We plan to focus our in-depth support on a subset of tools and users, with
an emphasis on support for the ("traditional") numerical style tools of
the toolkit, and on support for the experimental technologies most likely
to immediately impact NERSC applications, such as the ESI. In particular,
NERSC plans to actively participate in both the eigenvalue and structured
grid subgroups of the ESI group.
We would also like to work with the development teams of the more experimental
tools to identify NERSC applications that could potentially benefit from
the use of their tool, and to explore those benefits through active collaborations.
Should the CCA proceed with plans to develop a "real" prototypical application,
we will seek also seek to paricipate in that effort.
In the next year we will also investigate improving user support in
two new areas, both of which are expected to have strong ties to the ESI
effort. The first is interfaces for the solution of eigenvalue problems,
for which ACTS has no robust solutions. As potential ACTS users expect
this functionality, we need to make sure we can provide it to them, and
will investigate ways of doing this. The second is to look into creating
a web-based sandbox for learning how to use ACTS tools and comparing different
tools with similar capabilities. Since tool effectiveness is often application
specific (e.g. for the solution of sparse systems, where there is a wide
range of preconditioners and iterative solvers, and several ACTS tools
that provide them) such a sandbox would allow users to make more informed
decisions than we can enable through documentation and evaluation.
Tool Availability
Aztec, PETSc,
ScaLAPACK
and are available and officially supported on the NERSC T3E.