POSE: Phase I: Toward a Task-Parallel Programming Ecosystem for Modern Scientific Computing

为任务并行编程设计的开源软件系统已经成为广泛的现代科学计算应用的核心，例如机器学习和量子计算。虽然几十年的研究已经产生了许多开源的任务并行编程系统，但它们中的大多数都是由少数开发人员领导的，而且它们的影响不能长期持续下去。为了克服这一挑战，本项目提出了范围界定活动，为任务并行编程建立一个长期可持续的生态系统。这些活动建立在开源软件Taskflow之上，Taskflow是一个高性能的任务并行系统，可以简化复杂科学计算应用程序的构建。该项目首先发现一个基于Taskflow、量子计算、电路设计自动化和多媒体这三种日益增长的应用的生态系统。发现工作包括设计展示软件产品和组织研讨会，以追求Taskflow的最佳生态系统。然后，该项目设计了一系列开发人员培训计划，以吸引潜在的内容贡献者，他们可以帮助以社区驱动的方式开发和维护Taskflow。最后，该项目建立了一个透明且公开可见的治理模型，以形式化Taskflow的各种元素的决策过程，包括技术贡献、伙伴关系和安全策略。该项目为Taskflow转变为科学计算社区的健壮和可持续的系统资产奠定了基础，以便使用可扩展的基于任务的方法快速响应新兴的并行性。这个项目中的许多范围界定活动可以为Taskflow的商业采用注入信心，并与其他开源科学计算项目发展伙伴关系，进一步扩大其影响并增强可持续性。此外，在这个项目中产生的结果可以在课堂上用于更新现有的高性能计算和软件实践的学习材料，吸引不同群体的学生参与开源开发。该项目的网站可在https://taskflow.github.io/上获得，其中包含最新消息、源代码、逐步学习材料和基准测试。作者致力于长期开发和维护该项目。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Open-source software systems designed for task-parallel programming have become central to a wide range of modern scientific computing applications, such as machine learning and quantum computing. While decades of research has yielded many open-source task-parallel programming systems, most of them are led by a handful of developers and their impacts do not sustain in the long run. To overcome this challenge, this project proposes scoping activities to establish a route to a long-term sustainable ecosystem for task-parallel programming. These activities build atop the open-source software, Taskflow, a high-performance task-parallel system to streamline the building of complex scientific computing applications.This project starts by discovering an ecosystem based on three increasing applications of Taskflow, quantum computing, circuit design automation, and multimedia. The discovery effort consists of designing showcase software products and organizing workshops to pursue the optimal ecosystem for Taskflow. Then, the project designs a series of developer training programs to engage potential content contributors who can help develop and maintain Taskflow in a community-driven fashion. Finally, the project establishes a transparent and publicly visible governance model to formalize the decision-making process of Taskflow for various elements, including technical contributions, partnership, and security policies. This project lays the foundation for Taskflow to transition to a robust and sustainable system asset for the scientific computing community to quickly respond to emerging parallelism using scalable task-based approaches. Many scoping activities in this project can instill confidence in commercial adoption of Taskflow and grow its partnership with other open-source scientific computing projects to further broaden its impact and enhance sustainability. Also, results produced in this project can be used in classrooms to renovate existing learning materials for high-performance computing and software practice, engaging a diverse group of students in open-source development.The project website is available at https://taskflow.github.io/ which contains the latest news, source code, step-by-step learning materials, and benchmarks. The authors are committed to developing and maintaining the project in the long term.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.