SI2-SSE: RADICAL Cybertools: Scalable, Interoperable and Sustainable Tools for Science

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To support science and engineering applications that are the basis of many societal and intellectual challenges in the 21st century, there is a need for comprehensive, balanced, and flexible distributed cyberinfrastructure (DCI). The process of designing and deploying such large-scale DCI, however, presents a critical and challenging research agenda. One specific challenge is to produce tools that provide a step change in the sophistication of problems that can be investigated using DCI, while being extensible, easy to deploy and use, as well as being compatible with a variety of other established tools. RADICAL Cybertools will meet these requirements by providing an abstractions-based suite of well-defined capabilities that are architected to support scalable, interoperable and sustainable science on a range of high-performance and distributed computing infrastructure. RADICAL Cybertools builds upon important theoretical advances, production-software-development best practices, and carefully-analyzed usage and programming models. RADICAL Cybertools is posed to play a role in grand-challenge problems, ranging from personalized medicine and health to understanding long-term global and regional climate. All software developed through the project will be open source and will be licensed under the MIT License (MIT). Version control on the SVN repository will be accessible via http://radical.rutgers.edu.Existing and current utilization of RADICAL Cybertools is built upon preliminary research prototypes of RADICAL Cybertools. There is a significant difference, however, in the quality and capability required to support scalable end-usage science, compared to that of a research prototype. It is the aim of this project to bridge this gap between the ability to serve as a research prototype versus the challenges of supporting scalable end-usage science. This will be achieved by addressing existing limitations of usability, functionality, and scalability. We will do so by utilizing conceptual and theoretical advances in the understanding of distributed systems and middleware, resulting in a scalable architecture and robust design. We will employ advances in performance engineering, data-intensive methods, and cyberinfrastructure to deliver the next generation of RADICAL Cybertools. This project will take the existing research prototypes of RADICAL Cybertools to the next level towards becoming a hardened, extensible, and sustainable tool that will support a greater number of users, application types, and resource types.