POSE: Phase I: Tuitus - A sustainable, inclusive, open ecosystem for Natural Hazards Engineering

This project is funded by Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) which seeks to harness the power of open-source development for the creation of new technology solutions to problems of national and societal importance. Natural hazards, such as floods, landslides, earthquakes, tornadoes, and wildfires, threaten more than 57% of the US national infrastructure.

Modeling these complex natural hazards pushes the frontiers of high-performance computing, multi-scale modeling, in-situ visualization, big-data analysis, and machine learning. Scientific software codes are often developed in an ad hoc manner by university researchers and graduate students with very little exposure to software development principles and practices.

The robustness and open-source nature of these scientific codes are essential for the safety and security of the nation, its people, and the environment. The project establishes the Tuitus Foundation (Latin for “to protect or care for”), a sustainable, inclusive, open ecosystem of scientific codes for Natural Hazard Engineering (NHE). The project’s novelties are creating a unified interface that supports integration testing, research reproducibility, and workflow provenance in distributed computing environments.

The project supports building scalable, automated testing and workflow management for high-performance computing (HPC) environments. The project tackles the social issues around building and sustaining a community by establishing a Governing Board of Directors and supporting community-driven software development in NHE. The project creates an inclusive community by offering guidelines and training for onboarding and supporting new developers through hackathons and Google Summer of Code.

By auto-deploying thoroughly tested HPC software to the NSF-funded DesignSafe Cyberinfrastructure, the project impacts the broader community of 6,000 NHE researchers by making robust NHE codes immediately accessible.

Open-source codes in NHE will significantly impact the decision-making process and regional-scale risk assessment. The integration of Tuitus Foundation’s HPC Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) service with DesignSafe creates a paradigm shift in open-source code delivery in NHE, improving real-world policy decisions during critical natural hazard events.

The Tuitus Foundation adopts a holistic approach to address the critical technical challenges in the Open-Source Ecosystem (OSE) by offering a standard Application Programming Interface (API) for HPC and heterogenous hardware architectures and supporting a wide range of applications from HPC, machine learning, database schemas, Jupyter notebooks, and visualizations. This project is the first attempt to integrate HPC-scale CI testing with natural hazard engineering codes for multi-job pipelines.

The Tapis framework provides programmable interfaces that enable developers to automate data management and job execution on HPC and cloud resources. Tapis OAuth2 provides a separate security layer for managing user credentials, allowing Tapis to access many different storage and computing resources on behalf of the user. HPC-scale CI/CD with theTapis API enables testing for extreme-scale problems on distributed computing environments and future exascale systems.

The project offers workflow provenance in Jupyter notebooks by tracking workflows and packaging runtime environment, thus enhancing research reproducibility. The novel CI developments bring together literate programming and HPC testing to provide the much-needed robustness to improve trustworthiness in engineering decision-making.

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.