Building an Effective Ecosystem with Community Policies

With the development of increasingly complex computer architectures and software ecosystems, large-scale scientific applications increasingly require the combined use of a variety of software packages. The Extreme-scale Scientific Software Development Kit (xSDK) provides an infrastructure for mathematical libraries to support high-performance application codes. To achieve the seamless coordination and build of a variety of software libraries that were independently developed at different institutions requires a set of guidelines. The xSDK community policies are designed to overcome incompatibilities between xSDK libraries that hinder building and using them in combination. They also promote software quality, productivity, and sustainability. For a package to become an xSDK member requires compatibility with the community policies. To ensure that the policies do not become stale, the xSDK team regularly revisits them and makes changes when deemed necessary. This presentation discusses history, definition and impact of the xSDK community policies.A talk presented at the SIAM CSE21 conference, MS94+MS125: Building Sustainable Software Communities and Sustainable Software.