Reusability in Science: From Initial User Engagement to Dissemination of Results
This addresses software sustainability issues for scientific computing communities, but it is incremental as it builds on existing ecosystem concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of software sustainability in scientific computing by examining the role of user engagement and reusability, finding that application-level reusability promotes sustainability through experiences with two user groups reusing common software on different infrastructures.
Effective use of parallel and distributed computing in science depends upon multiple interdependent entities and activities that form an ecosystem. Active engagement between application users and technology catalysts is a crucial activity that forms an integral part of this ecosystem. Technology catalysts play a crucial role benefiting communities beyond a single user group. An effective user-engagement, use and reuse of tools and techniques has a broad impact on software sustainability. From our experience, we sketch a life-cycle for user-engagement activity in scientific computational environment and posit that application level reusability promotes software sustainability. We describe our experience in engaging two user groups from different scientific domains reusing a common software and configuration on different computational infrastructures.