Infrastructure hardening

Rocstar Multiphysics Application

Software hardening implementation: Infrastructure hardening

1. Development infrastructure: Rocstar development infrastructure will be turned such that it is customer-facing. Development and distribution of Rocstar will be conducted from a customer-facing central project site. The project site and infrastructure will very likely leverage existing infrastructure provided by one or more of publicly available open source project hosting sites. The project site will be established very early in the Phase I project.
   • Build system (Phase I): Rocstar’s build system is currently based on a hierarchy of legacy Makefiles. This system greatly increases the complexity of porting and installation on new platforms. The current system will be replaced by an upgraded CMake-based system.
   • Testing infrastructure (Phase I/II): A testing framework will be created for Rocstar and used to aid both in the development during this project and in deployment on customer-owned platforms. The testing framework will include facilities for unit, integration, installation, and verification and validation (V&V) testing. Rocstar’s existing tests will be imported into this framework and new tests will be added in support of this project.
   • Distribution system (Phase I): Rocstar will be distributed from its customer-facing development site. An integrated system for producing source and binary distributions in widely supported package formats targeting modern HPC systems will be developed.
   • Public repository (Phase I): A customer-facing open source repository will be identified and used in Rocstar development. Current candidates include SourceForge and GitHub.
   • Documentation (Phase I/II/III): Rocstar documentation will be updated, revised, and distributed from the project site. User and developer guides for each Rocstar software component will be provided.
   • Project roadmap (Phase I): Keeping customers apprised of the project roadmap, development, and estimated delivery on requested features is important in open applications. Rocstar’s development roadmap will be published on the project site.
   • Issue tracking (Phase I): An issue and feature request tracking facility will be established for the customer/user community.
   • Community (Phase I/II/III): Illinois Rocstar will attempt to build a working community around the development of Rocstar. The community will be seeded by Rocstar’s current users from industry, academia, and government, and will be grown throughout execution of the project.
2. Software infrastructure: Rocstar’s legacy software infrastructure will be modified to improve usability and prepare for integration with modern HPC-targeted infrastructure.
   • Standard I/O (Phase I): A system for synchronization and control of Rocstar’s screen and logging outputs will be established.
   • Solution/restart/visualization I/O (Phase II): Rocstar’s strategy for its runtime solution, restart, and visualization dumps will be overhauled. Currently, each Rocstar process produces large numbers of files for each dump. The dump files are written in a Rocstar-specific form of HDF4. Very high processor counts and availability of high-quality scientific visualization software warrants modernization of Rocstar solution I/O.
   • Error handling (Phase II): A framework for consistent error handling across all Rocstar components is needed.
   • Performance profiling (Phase II): Automated performance profiling on modern platforms will be provided for all Rocstar components. This will be important for evaluating both simulation and platform performance as Rocstar’s user base and number of host platforms grows.
   • IMPACT (Phase II): Rocstar will be ported on top of Illinois Rocstar’s DOE-funded IMPACT infrastructure. This will draw in the standardization associated with IMPACT and allow Rocstar to be extended, enhanced, and coupled with external software more easily.

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Software hardening implementation

1. Infrastructure hardening
2. User interface hardening
3. Applications and deployment

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