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That's actually something that I've tried to point out with Spack - I have this chart that shows "Here's the amount of programmatic funding that we have for Spack", it's like two engineers, or something like that, and "Here's all the contributions that we've gotten." Over the course of a year, the number of packages de... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm wondering, for getting contributions specifically... That must be influenced by academic cycles as well, right? So if you have people that are contributing while they're doing their post-doc, and afterwards they stop - is that a thing? |
**Todd Gamblin:** \[52:04\] Yeah, that's a really good point. I think that might be another aspect of the research funding structure that maybe doesn't work so well as the long-term sustainability strategy. In research you're really encouraged to be a PI (principle investigator) and to start new things, so to advance y... |
I think some projects have managed to make it do that, projects that are widely used... I mentioned the ROSE compiler here. They've published tons of papers, and they always have new collaboration going on some piece of their compiler infrastructure. But there's only certain products that can do that. |
We have a paper on Spack, we submitted it to the State-of-the-Practice Track at Supercomputing, which is the big conference in my area, and I think that got us a lot of publicity, but how we would publish more papers, or continue to publish papers about it is up in the air, so we have to rely on the programmatic fundin... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Can you talk a little bit about Exascale? Because I know you mentioned that that's a project where the focus has been on actually developing the software and not just on writing papers or getting funding that way, so how did that happen? |
**Todd Gamblin:** The Exascale computing project is a major collaboration between the six national laboratories. So it's Livermore, Los Alamos, Sandia, Argonne, Oak Ridge and Lawrence Berkeley Lab. PNNL is in there as well - that's Pacific Northwest National Lab... And I think some other labs are collaborating. But it'... |
So there are plans to build large Exascale machines, and this project is to design the software stack. That's at exascaleproject.org. That was sort of motivated by an immediate need to go and actually build the software stack so that when the Exascale machine gets here - which is something that we're planning to do - t... |
There's 15 or so simulation codes in the Exascale project, everything from like nuclear fusion to the climate community, to molecular dynamics... There's lots of useful science there that could be used and could have an impact on industries, like for making cars better, making more clean energy in different areas... Bu... |
I'm involved in it in two ways - one is with Spack. I would like Spack to be the package manager that's used for the Exascale project, so that that's how we deploy things on supercomputers, that's how we built things and that's how we make it easy for, say, someone in the industry to pick up one of these codes and use ... |
I'm also the lead on a software productivity project - I'm the Livermore lead on a software productivity project (Mike Heroux and Lois Curfman-McInnes from Sandia and Argonne are the main leads on this). But there's actually like an effort within this project, because it has to deliver software, to make the developers ... |
That involves things like putting training out there, familiarizing scientists and some of these computational scientists who develop the applications with how to build communities and how to write documentation, how to use source control well, how to have a release cycle, things like that. |
\[56:12\] I think it's kind of new territory in a lot of ways, because I don't think we've had a coordinated effort to build a software stack quite as large, so one of the things we've been talking about lately is "How do we coordinate releases of 15 applications in 80 different software projects?" That's not easy. And... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** And just to clarify, that is an open source software stack... |
**Todd Gamblin:** So not all of it is open source. For example, some of our weapons simulations are included in the Exascale project, because they need to be able to run on Exascale machines, but those are not open source. Sorry. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Phew! |
**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah, but in large part -- a lot of the science parts of it and a lot of the math libraries and the computer science infrastructure are open source; this is stuff that people could build on. I think it would be really awesome if we could build simulation frameworks and things that someone could come a... |
Our code teams are sort of starting to think about that. We recently had an effort internally to look at how our simulations are structured, and I think they found that something like 40%-50% of the code is pure computer science - no physics, nothing sensitive - and that part could be factored out as like a general too... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** So how do you get industry contributors involved in situations like that? Do they come to the same sort of conferences that you do? Do you have to reach out to them individually? |
**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah, that's a problem. They don't always come to the same sorts of conferences. Industry HPC has always been -- it's something that people shoot for, but not a lot of companies really get into it. There are companies like Exxon that have HPC clusters and they kind of do their own specific simulations... |
But one of the goals of this project would be to sort of expand the middle tier of HPC. It's always been sort of elusive. We'd like to have smaller companies able to use these kinds of resources, but I think the complexity of getting into supercomputing has been so high that they haven't necessarily jumped on board. Bu... |
I think Procter & Gamble - I'm blanking on the guy's name, but he came out here and gave a talk about all the different ways that they use HPC. You've heard of Procter & Gamble I guess, but they have lots of companies under them that they run, so he talked about how they'd used simulations for everything from making th... |
The other problem with getting industry contributors I think is that in many cases for something as complex as like a piece of simulation software, the industry folks really want someone to support it, they want someone to call and to say "We're having problems deploying this. What do we do?" I think for that we would ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[01:00:06.16\] Well, we're gonna close out on that note... Do you have any final thoughts to share about lessons learned from your experiences open sourcing in a fairly (I'd say) comparably difficult context? |
**Todd Gamblin:** One of the things that I've learned from Spack I guess is that you really have to think about the broader context for the thing that you're building, and that means giving up some degree of control. I think there are a lot of projects where they've grown up in one lab and they've served that one team,... |
For Spack we've tried to be really open about contributions; maybe not necessarily implementing things for people, but helping them to implement things and thinking outside of our own use case. That's one of the ways that I think we've gotten contributors and that's how I think we've been able to grow our community. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I think that's a general open source problem... A lot of people who start projects don't wanna give up control, but they want people to work on it. |
**Todd Gamblin:** Yeah, I totally agree. And teaching people to do that... Actually, that's one thing I could say - a lot of our teams are scared of what will happen if they put something out there as open source and they start to get a lot of pull requests. They're like, "What do I do? I'm gonna have to support all th... |
I don't have a silver bullet for "How do we maintain this feature you contributed after you contributed it?" I think that's the harder problem and you have to get creative. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Definitely. Thanks for coming on. |
**Todd Gamblin:** Sure, thanks for having me. It's been great! |
**Nadia Eghbal:** So before we get into p5.js, you have a pretty interesting background in terms of how you got into open source in the first place. Can you tell us a little bit about that? |
**Lauren McCarthy:** Yeah, I guess I have some background in computer science - or I did, just like undergrad, but I really moved more into an arts space after that. But I was doing art using software, so I used a lot of open source tools, some of them tools called open frameworks or processing. It was after grad schoo... |
I didn't really know where to start, but I just kind of joined some mailing lists and thought I could kind of figure it out. The thing that I found was that it was really hard to know where to begin. I was kind of like, "Oh, I'm here, I wanna help!", and no one really reached out; I felt like, "Oh, okay, I'm gonna have... |
That just didn't work for a while, until actually Casey Reas, who makes the Processing project along with Ben Fry and Dan Shiffman - I had a conversation with him and I was kind of mentioning this and he invited me, he immediately reached out and said "Oh, do you wanna work on Processing?" and kind of gave me a really ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** So did you create p5.js or was it a collaboration with other people? How did that all work? |
**Lauren McCarthy:** Yeah, so I guess when they asked me to work on processing, the idea -- well, I said "I've just been starting to learn JavaScript, and I think it's really cool... So if there's something I could do with that...", and they said -- so Processing, maybe to back up a minute, is like a platform for makin... |
\[04:16\] So it kind of came out of this frustration that with Java you would have to write all this code and know what you're doing pretty well just to get like a circle to appear on the screen. With Processing, the idea was that it's just one line of code to get you a circle on the screen, and with one more line you ... |
So the task they gave me (or the question) was, you know, Java, when they began the project in 2001, was the de facto language to be working in, and since then - this was like 2013 - there was some energy around the web, or JavaScript specifically... So they were asking "What would Processing look like today, or if it ... |
In the beginning it was me, and I was working with a collaborator, Evelyn Eastmond, who also had some experience with another learning platform called Scratch. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Was she at Bocoup...? |
**Lauren McCarthy:** Yeah, she was, and then now she's working with -- what's it called? HARC. Human Advancement Research Center; it's the Ellen K. It's the Alan Kay research group. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Cool. |
**Lauren McCarthy:** But yeah, so we were working on that together for a little while, and then she ended up kind of moving away from the project right before we did a public release at the first year maybe... It was the two of us working together on that. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I recall that there was sort of like a proof of concept of Processing in JavaScript that John Resig, the creator of jQuery did at one point... But it didn't really have -- how do I put this...? It didn't have all the things that make this useful. p5.js has a lot of things that really help you along, ... |
**Lauren McCarthy:** Yeah, there was a little bit. When John made that, he kind of, I think, did a very -- he was able to do it actually pretty quickly and just ported Processing to JavaScript. It was less like a project that he wanted to maintain and more like you said, a proof of concept, and put it out there. Then s... |
We talked a little bit with some of the people involved with that project, and then I think ultimately decided to try and remove any existing requirements or infrastructure and just start from scratch. One reason was that we were really thinking of this not as a port to JavaScript, but like a reinterpretation for the w... |
\[08:27\] I think there were some tensions around like "Why not just put this energy into (the other project was Processing.js) Processing.js?" And yeah, I think it was really just being able to kind of start from scratch, and I think also where I was at the time when I started the project, I just didn't really have th... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** That's interesting. There's such a huge audience for this... What did you do to kind of get the word out a little bit and promote it, and then what was the community response around it? |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Well, like I said, there's a few different audiences, and with the Processing audience it was not too hard. I mean, one reason for choosing the name p5.js was like the "brand" recognition... Because we had some ideas of just like other names that might be fun to use, and I think the word "processing" ... |
Then there was also this audience of web users that I was excited about; maybe they were people that were artists or designers, or maybe they were also just people that were not that, but were interested in doing more of that, and maybe they already had a fluency with the web, but were actually looking for something th... |
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