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All of these -- you notice that there's two ways to go always in open source, or in this whole conversation? There's free software and open, there's permissive and inherited, there's BDFL and consensus, there's foundation and not foundation... It's really interesting how there's always two choices, and just like seeds ... |
\[01:16:08.10\] And we've gotta remember - 20 years seems like a long time; it seems like a long time to me, but really, it's just a blip. There's gonna be a lot more time that people try on these different structures. |
There's a bunch of people who think that open source is doomed because software will change in a way that means that it isn't created this way anymore and it doesn't matter, but I still think that the moment in history that we took advantage of to create it and bring it this far - it ws worth doing, because... I think ... |
I'm so happy to have spent the time that I've spent supporting this work, and trying to connect the dots where it looked like a dot needed connecting, and I've really had a good time talking to you guys about it, too. I don't know if it's unintelligible still, or if it helps to hear these stories... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** No, it's been perfect. And that was kind of a perfect wrap-up as well. |
**Danese Cooper:** Okay, I do what I can. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** This has been great, Danese. Thanks for coming on. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, thanks for chatting with us. |
**Danese Cooper:** Of course, of course. |
• Todd Gamblin's job role at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory |
• Overview of Lawrence Livermore's missions and responsibilities |
• Todd's specific work on Spack, DevOps, and machine learning for parallel performance |
• The lab's history with open source, including the development of Linux for HPC machines and popular open-source projects like ZFS and Slurm |
• Collaboration across the DOE, universities, and other laboratories |
• Slurm is used on Linux clusters at Lawrence Livermore Lab, including a 1.5 million core IBM Blue Gene machine |
• ZFS file system is used in industry and has been ported by Lawrence Livermore Lab for use with Lustre parallel file system |
• Spack package manager was open sourced by Todd Gamblin as part of his work at Lawrence Livermore Lab, but it's not the first project he open sourced |
• CRAM tool splits jobs into smaller ones to manage large-scale computing tasks on the lab's clusters |
• The lab has a policy document from 2004 requiring software developed under Advanced Simulation Computing Initiative to be open source unless there are reasons not to |
• Todd Gamblin notes that while some projects may generate royalties, others like Spack are more suitable for open sourcing and sharing resources among computing sites |
• The lab's IP organization reviews software releases, including a tedious process involving burning CDs and filling out paper forms |
• Spack is a package manager for high-performance computing (HPC) environments, specifically designed to build and manage software on large machines. |
• The project was created by Todd Gamblin at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to address specific challenges in the HPC software ecosystem, such as complex dependency management and reliance on vendor libraries. |
• Spack is a "functional" package manager that builds software from source and assigns a unique hash to each dependency graph, allowing for reproducibility and versioning. |
• The project's primary audience is not the general public but rather a smaller community of HPC researchers and developers who require high-performance computing capabilities. |
• Contributing to Spack requires specialized knowledge of HPC environments and software development, limiting its contributor base. |
• Growing the contributor base could involve expanding outreach to industry partners and other stakeholders in the HPC community. |
• Structure of HPC communities with multiple roles (users, developers, center staff) |
• Spack deployment model vs cloud-based models |
• HPC centers' varying approaches to open source software and community building |
• Influence of industry on government's open source practices and adoption of GitHub |
• Challenges in implementing open source practices within government labs |
• NumFOCUS affiliation for the Spack project |
• Democratizing package management in HPC through Spack |
• Cultural differences between cluster maintainers and casual users |
• Spack's design choices (Python, Homebrew-based format) to make it easy for users to contribute |
• Comparison with other HPC package managers (EasyBuild) |
• Funding models for Spack (programmatic funding, grants from the Office of Science, LDRD) |
• Challenges in navigating funding opportunities and the gap between research funding and production funding |
• Importance of socializing projects to obtain programmatic funding |
• Challenges with maintaining software projects due to lack of funding stability |
• Importance of exit plans for research projects, including programmatic funding options |
• Differences in how government organizations and private companies approach software maintenance costs |
• Benefits and limitations of using grants versus programmatic funding for research projects |
• Strategies for sustaining software products through community building and contributor engagement |
• Impact of academic cycles on contribution rates to software projects |
• Success stories, such as Exascale, where focus is placed on developing software rather than just writing papers or getting funding |
• Development of software stack for large-scale scientific applications |
• Coordinating releases of multiple applications within the stack |
• Balance between open-source and proprietary components in the stack |
• Involving industry contributors and expanding HPC adoption to smaller companies |
• Addressing support needs for industry users and potential solutions (e.g. support contracts, small companies) |
• Lessons learned from open-sourcing Spack and importance of thinking beyond one's own use case |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Todd, you work for the government... Tell us what your actual job is. |
**Todd Gamblin:** Okay, so I work for a specific part of government... I work for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory - it's part of the department of energy. I'm a computer scientist, that's my job title (we don't really have official job titles here). Effectively, I'm a researcher, I'm a project lead, and I'm also... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** And for those unfamiliar, what is Lawrence Livermore? |
**Todd Gamblin:** Lawrence Livermore is one of three labs in the National Nuclear Security Agency. It's part of the DOE, and we're responsible for a whole lot of different national security missions. That includes things like nuclear non-proliferation, making sure that people don't sell nuclear materials... We're also ... |
\[03:55\] I think all sorts of missions at the Laboratory are based on computing and our Livermore Computing Center, which is where all the different clusters are that we run. I work both with the research organization and with the computing center, and also with the code teams, who are from all different parts of the ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** So you play with nuclear weapons all day? |
**Todd Gamblin:** I do not play with nuclear weapons all day. \[laughter\] What I do is mostly in a support role. We're working with the simulation team... One of the things that we simulate is nuclear weapons, that's true. We also have a whole lot of open science codes; we work with all those different teams to help t... |
In the research role, what I do is I work with a lot of students in academia, I have post-docs who work for me, and we'll usually talk to the code teams, try to figure out what their problems are, what kind of things are they having issues with in terms of making sure that their simulations run fast, and then we try to... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Cool. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[05:52\] So in terms of like your team and everything... Is this a bunch of people in the same physical location? I think when people hear of a lab, they're thinking like some place with a giant hadron collider, or something... Is this institution slightly virtualized, as well? You mentioned you're ... |
**Todd Gamblin:** I would say it's both. Livermore itself is a one square mile laboratory in Livermore, California; it's like an hour from San Francisco. We do have a giant laser here... We have the National Ignition Facility, which is the world's largest and highest energy laser; basically, that's like 192 beams that ... |
So that's more like on-site stuff... We would go and visit the code team, or they would come to our office, we have meetings, like a normal company... I sit in a building with the big computers, so basically I have an office building and there's essentially like a 48,000 square foot data center attached to it. But yeah... |
We also collaborate across the DOE and with a whole lot of universities. I have telecons all the time, I have collaborators at the University of Delaware, University of Arizona, University of Illinois and other places, with students, and then we also collaborate with people across the DOE. The Exascale project that I t... |
To some extent they're similar, because they have large physics experiments on their sites too, and all those big labs have big computing centers, but... We travel around the different labs and also to conferences and do things like present papers... So it's a fairly diverse job, working for the DOE. |
\[08:10\] I like it a lot because I'm not always working with programmers or computer scientists, I also get to talk to people who are doing physical sciences and other stuff. It's a pretty cool environment from that perspective. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Can you talk a little bit about your lab's history with open source? I think you've mentioned in previous conversations that your lab has open sourced a bunch of other types of projects before, and I was wondering also how did you personally get into open source in your current role? |
**Todd Gamblin:** If you look at Livermore's history, I think from the Lab's founding in 1952, we've deployed fast computers; building software for them has been a long part of the lab's history. We built this thing called the Livermore Time Sharing System - I say "we", but this was way before my time... And that was o... |
We also used to build compilers here. Apparently, we had a compiler team, there was something called "the Pastel Compiler." I think Richard Stallman actually wanted to base the original version of GCC on that, but I believe the memory requirements for it were way too high for ordinary computers... It wasn't gonna run o... |
Then as the machines evolved, we've deployed more and more fast machines, and in the '90s they started looking more like clusters. We were one of the first labs to look at deploying Linux on our machines and maintaining our own Linux distribution for HPC (high performance computing) machines. So we did that... |
We have a developer here who ported ZFS to Linux from Solaris, and he maintains that port, that's pretty popular... And I think in general in the research community people have done open source a lot. I don't think that necessarily means that they've taken steps to popularize or necessarily build really large communiti... |
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