The PETSc Community Is the Infrastructure
It highlights the importance of community structures in enabling scientific progress through open-source software, but is incremental in its analysis of an existing ecosystem.
The paper examines the PETSc community's role as essential human infrastructure for scientific software, focusing on its organization and technical approaches that facilitate efficient mutual support among members.
The communities who develop and support open source scientific software packages are crucial to the utility and success of such packages. Moreover, these communities form an important part of the human infrastructure that enables scientific progress. This paper discusses aspects of the PETSc (Portable Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation) community, its organization, and technical approaches that enable community members to help each other efficiently.