A Common Computational Science Environment for High Performance Computing Centers

The Computational Sciences Environment (CSE) was developed to provide a standard development platform for data analysis, visualization, and software testing and evaluation. The Classified Data Analysis and Assessment Center (CDAAC), in conjunction with the Computational Sciences and Engineering Branch (CSEB) of the Army Research Laboratory, assembled a set of open source data analysis tools and applications, software management and testing tools, and libraries necessary to run the tools; and made them available as a package called CSE. CSE also provides experimental software builds for users who might need newer features than what is currently available in the release package. The CSE team provides support for developers, the end-user, and distributed development teams. Tests are regularly run on the software, both current and release, and the results are submitted to quality dashboards for review using CTest. CTest is part of an open-source software building tool called CMake. Developers can use CSE as a template and can customize it to meet their specific project goals. CSE provides developers with a common tool set to assist in developing portable high performance computing (HPC) Applications. Development of CSE has been managed through an open-source project management application that provides Software Configuration Management (SCM) integration of the CSE repository, informational wikis, bug tracking, and feature requests. To support distributed development teams, CSE provides project management tools, software repositories, SCM, and online software quality dashboards.