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**Mikeal Rogers:** The other HPC centers - are they as adept at open source as Lawrence Livermore is? Do they have similar policies around it, or are you a little bit ahead in that regard? |
**Todd Gamblin:** I don't know that we're necessarily better or worse than the other labs... I think there's strengths and weaknesses in terms of the process. There is no standard process for releasing open source software; it kind of varies from lab to lab. In terms of actually having popular research software, I thin... |
\[32:19\] I think in large part -- I mean, all the different laboratories have had some large open source project that they've put out there. I think DOE has had an open source software ecosystem for a while. I don't know that they've always had licenses or thought about the licensing aspect of these things, or thought... |
Accepting pull requests wasn't really easy before GitHub; even setting up infrastructure outside your laboratory could be difficult. A lot of Livermore teams have had trouble setting up all the hosting infrastructure that you need to host an actual project with collaboration tools, Subversion, things like that. So we'v... |
Al Livermore recently we've consolidated our GitHub presence, we've gotten more and more people to join the GitHub organization for LLNL; I think it's become easier, so more and more people are getting into that and really starting to think about how they put their software out there and how they do build communities a... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I wonder how much - I know government is not a monolithic thing, so maybe just for you guys - of open source practices are being influenced by industry, versus they're doing it on their own... Do they care what companies are doing now with open source and looking at that and saying "Oh, we should do i... |
**Todd Gamblin:** I think different people are pushing that at different laboratories; it just really depends on the part of the laboratory. You could have two groups on the same hallway who feel very differently about this. We have some teams who are reticent to put their development version out there, they don't wann... |
Yeah, so we have people here who have really pushed to get -- Ian Lee, the guy who presented at GitHub Universe on Livermore's open source software, he really pushed to get people to consolidate there and to use open tools, to use sites like Readthedocs and stuff like that, and other labs have people like that as well. |
But you know, like I said, I think that labs have for a long time -- software projects, they don't think about building a community around it, and they don't think about it in the same way that the industry does now, in the way that I saw... Like, when I was at the Open Source Leadership Summit (the Linux Foundation ev... |
I wouldn't say though that historically the labs have been against that, I just don't know that they've thought about collaborating among the different labs as much. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** In terms of where you decide to start going with Spack, I noticed that Spack joined NumFOCUS as an affiliated project... For anyone who's listening, NumFOCUS is an umbrella organization for a lot of scientific and academic related open source projects, so I was wondering why did you decide to join Num... |
**Todd Gamblin:** \[36:25\] I don't know, it was kind kind of on a whim. I went to the NumFOCUS web page and I looked at their supported projects and their affiliated projects. I mean, I like all the stuff that NumFOCUS is doing; they're doing all kinds of awesome things, especially for the Python community, and R... |
I think that was right after Fernando Perez, the Jupiter guy (he's at Berkeley Lab); he had come out and given a talk here. So I don't know, I was inspired to go and do it. They had a list of requirements and they were like "You can be a NumFOCUS affiliated project if you this, this and this", so I wrote them an email ... |
And what does it mean to me? Well, I like what those guys are doing, and they said that if your project on the NumFOCUS web page, they can encourage people to contribute to your project. So I think for me it was that I'd like to be associated with this community so that potentially these other scientific developers cou... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** You've said something interesting earlier, which is that you've gotten more contributors from the user side of things than you have from the people maintaining the cluster side. Do you think that that's because you've democratized the whole role a little bit more, so you've made it easier and gotten ... |
**Todd Gamblin:** I think it might be a cultural difference. One thing I've found with the HPC centers is they don't adopt things easily; they have processes in place that they use to deploy software; that's been more of a socialization effort, like talking to them and saying "We're really behind this. This is a solid ... |
For example, one thing we did to get NERSC (which is Lawrence Berkeley Labs supercomputing center) on board is we worked with them to actually port Spack to work in the Cray environment. That was a fair amount of work, but they actually put in some developer effort and so did we, and we thought that was valuable becaus... |
I think one of the things that we did with Spack that was really helpful for getting more casual users to contribute was -- I mean, we looked at Homebrew and some of these other projects... I mean, Spack's package format is based on Homebrew, it's just Python and not Ruby. We looked at what we could do to make it reall... |
All you really had to do with Spack is clone it. It doesn't require you to be able to run Pip or some other Python package manager; you can just clone it and then you can run the Spack executable out of the directory there. |
I think that has helped get the regular hackers to start using it. That, and we specifically chose Python because Python is a popular language for scientific computing. I should say that Spack is not the first attempt to build an HPC package manager, there have been others. Oak Ridge had an internal package manager tha... |
\[40:07\] Actually, there's another popular package manager that's written in Python from HPC at the University of Ghent (that's in Belgium). It's called EasyBuild. They've done really good things for HPC packaging, but their tool is focused mostly on (I'd say) administrators of clusters, and it doesn't make it easy to... |
I was kind of modeling the Spack contribution model on Homebrew, because that seemed like a successful thing, and it's actually something that people in this community use on their Macs, and it seemed like they did a really good job of making it easy to contribute. So to a large extent, I think it was because we made i... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Right, yeah. It sounds like the big differentiator for you has been focusing on the users rather than on the cluster maintainers. And, aligning with NumFOCUS is part of that, because most of what they work on is there; being in Python is definitely a part of that, too. |
**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Coming up, we get into funding for Spack and how Todd keeps this thing alive, what it's like working on a project from grant to grant versus ongoing programmatic support, and the challenges for open source in government, especially the Department of Energy. Stay tuned. |
**Break:** \[41:54\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So let's dig into it a little bit... Tell us a little bit about how you get funding for your particular projects. You mentioned a couple projects already that get you a fair amount of funding... How does the funding flow into your project specifically? |
**Todd Gamblin:** So for Spack, right now we are programmatically funded. What that means is we're funded by a program. I guess in DOE (and in government in general) a program is a giant source of funding that's been allocated potentially by Congress; that's kind of the best kind of funding, because it doesn't end, unl... |
There's lots of research funding in government and in DOE. We have an internal funding source, so for all the grants that we get at Livermore, we tax them and we have this thing called LDRD - I think a lot of the other labs do, too; it's called Lab-Directed Research and Development... So if you are doing research, you ... |
\[44:08\] There's competitive funding grants from the Office of Science, so that's another part of DOE; it's outside the NNSA, but we can apply for funding from there. In fact, a lot of our basic science research is funded by that. |
Then internally we have some funding pots that are discretionary... Basically, the management of the computational organization LLNL has discretionary money that you can go after. I think it's a more informal proposal process, but that's for things like hardening and maybe porting something to a new platform... Things ... |
Other things that people have been known to do - there's a whole SBIR program in the federal government... Are you familiar with that? It's Small Business Innovation Research. That is funding for small businesses to get started. A lot of things that started out as maybe programmatic projects and then sort of outgrew th... |
Academic teams will do that, too. We've got some collaborators who built parallel programming models who've gone and spun off companies for things like that. |
There are a whole lot of ways to get funded. Navigating all that I think is fairly difficult, and then one observation that I guess I would say I have about the whole process is that there is a lot of research funding in our area for cutting edge things, but as far as actually maintaining the software, that is not cons... |
I think doing that is often a lot of work... You need to socialize your thing, you need to convince someone who controls programmatic funding that they need this thing. Often times, that's getting it into one of our simulation codes, making them rely on it; that's something that would catch people's interest. |
Other things would be making it a critical product for the compute center, like if we're actually using it to deploy clusters and we need it, and it makes us more efficient - that's another way that you can get programmatic funding. But in general, it depends on what the software is and what mission it supports how you... |
There's also a distinction between hard money and soft money. Are you guys familiar with that from Academic research? |
**Nadia Eghbal:** No. |
**Todd Gamblin:** Hard money would be like the programmatic money, where it's ongoing, it doesn't necessarily go away... It's either overhead for the organization, or it's part of how Livermore is supported over time. Soft money is stuff that you have to apply for, and it tends to have a short lifetime. If you get a re... |
Usually, the exit plan for a lot of projects here is get programmatic funding for the thing, but that doesn't always happen. It's not an easy task to get a project funded, I would say, and to get it to grown. I think that's pretty similar to elsewhere. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Nobody cares about maintenance, huh? |
**Todd Gamblin:** Right, and I think that's actually -- I don't think people think about maintenance as much as they should. I think people think that once you do the research, that it's magic, or something, and the software continues to work because you've already done the development for it... But there's a ton of ma... |
\[48:07\] Depending on the part of the organization it is, the compute center here is very conscious of the maintenance costs. I don't necessarily think that the people who are running research programs are always aware of that, or thinking about how that thing might take off after the research program. I mean, that's ... |
Tech Transfer is something that we care a lot about. We're supposed to make products viable for industry, and people like it when you do that... But on the software side, I think that -- I think one thing is that the labs... Like, we're fundamentally a science organization, right? We have a science mission, and we have... |
For example, for our simulation codes I think there was this study done, and we found that the number of engineers per lines of code that they had to support and maintain on our teams was a lot -- we had a lot more lines of code per engineers than industry teams do. That was interesting to me, just from a "what do we t... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I feel like we're covering some of the instability in the funding and we're kind of focused on that, and what it doesn't do... But I'm just trying to compare this to other funding sources that we've talked about. If you start a startup, you're gonna have to go out and beg for money every two years... |
**Todd Gamblin:** Yes. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** If you do grant funding, you're gonna spend a year to get a year of funding, and then have to beg for money again, year on year on year for grants. I think compared to those funding sources, it's actually relatively stable. |
**Todd Gamblin:** It is. Programmatic funding is definitely stable compared to those, and I think that's a good thing, right? I think you've talked on this show in the past about software as a public good, right? Maybe the infrastructure is something that should be funded by some part of government for maintenance. I t... |
On our side, the things that I'm pushing for are -- we've gotta think about things that could have a broader impact, we've gotta think about things that we could build communities around, because then we could get both contributors for our projects, and also the investment would pay off for us because we'd be supportin... |
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