Scientific software libraries have long provided a large and growing resource for high-quality, reusable software components upon which applications from science and engineering can be rapidly constructed — with improved robustness, portability, and sustainability. For this, a team of researchers from four collaborating organizations proposed to develop BALLISTIC (Basic ALgebra Libraries for Sustainable Technology with Interdisciplinary Collaboration). The BALLISTIC project, through the leading-edge research it channels into its software deliverables, will lead to the introduction of tools that will simplify the transition to the next generation of extreme-scale computer architectures. The main impact of the project will be to develop, push, and deploy software into the scientific community to make it competitive on a world-wide scale and to contribute to standardization efforts in the area. BALLISTIC has the potential to become the community standard for dense linear algebra and be adopted and/or supported by a large community of users, computing centers, and High-Performance Computing (HPC) vendors. Learning to use numerical libraries is a basic part of the education of a computational scientist or engineer in many fields and at many academic institutions. BALLISTIC will have a correspondingly large impact on the research and education community, government laboratories, and private industry and support national efforts to build a workforce capable of employing state of the art tools in pursuit of science and engineering discoveries.
The goal of BALLISTIC is to create a layered package of software components that is capable of running at every level of the platform deployment pyramid and achieves three complementary objectives: (1) deliver seamless access to the most up-to-date algorithms, numerics, and performance via familiar Sca/LAPACK interfaces, wherever possible; (2) make advanced algorithms, numerics, and performance capabilities available through new interface extensions, wherever necessary; and (3) provide a well-engineered conduit through which new discoveries at the frontiers of research in these areas can be channeled as quickly as possible to all the applications from science and engineering communities that depend on high-performance linear algebra libraries.
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.
