Minisymposium

NumFOCUS's mission is "to promote open practices in research, data, and scientific computing by serving as a fiscal sponsor for open source projects and organizing community-driven educational programs." The emphasis is on projects that can lead to the advancement of scientific research. It began in 2012 and currently includes over sixty projects.The Portable Toolkit for Scientific Computations (PETSc) has been actively developed in the public over the last thirty years; it has always been scientific-research driven and became a project member in 2023.Over the past decade, PETSc's development has expanded beyond its original hosting lab, not only because the leading developers are now working in academia or other institutions but, more importantly, because the project has received substantial contributions from the user community.

The ability of NumFOCUS to provide support in the form of small development grants for work not customarily funded by the hosting institution or research grants can significantly benefit the broader community.Becoming a NumFOCUS member requires that the project adopt a formal governance structure, follow a code of conduct, and publish a project roadmap. This presentation will discuss the reasons why PETSc would become a member and the governance structure of the PETSc community.

Spack is a founding project in the High Performance Software Foundation (HPSF), a nascent Linux Foundation project umbrella that aims to support open source projects as part of a portable, accelerated software stack for high performance computing. The Spack team has contemplated joining a foundation for a long time, but the plan for doing so has evolved significantly from initial conception to the now-established HPSF.

Initially, the Spack team simply wanted a neutral home to foster collaboration and to pay for project-specific expenses, like user meetings and a Slack workspace. However, Spack was also part of the Exascale Computing Project (ECP), a collaboration of over 1,000 scientists and around 100 different software projects. As ECP drew to an in 2023, it became apparent that many teams had similar needs. Rather than start a single foundation project, the Spack team joined forces with 9 other projects to start HPSF, which we hope will provide a path to expand HPC software’s reach further into AI, industrial, academic, and other communities. This talk will discuss the specific needs of Spack and how the HPSF concept evolved to cover the needs of Spack and the HPC ecosystem as a whole.

Kitware is a 25-years old company, leader in developing open source software for science and artificial intelligence, like CMake, VTK or ParaView. This talk will explore the challenges of maintaining these open source tools for a long time period, via an analysis of Kitware’s current and future business models. We’ll particularly emphasize the limitations of these models, and evaluate the alternative of working with a foundation to answer the following questions from an industry perspective. Who is responsible for the day to day maintenance of the software? Who is responsible for the release of the software? Who is responsible for the roadmap and vision of the software? And ultimately, who pays for it?

The minisymposium will conclude with a panel discussion moderated by the minisymposium organizer and featuring the invited speakers. The panel will be moderated as a conversation addressing audience questions about pathways to foundations including potential challenges, benefits, and next steps.