Understanding the landscape of scientific software used on high-performance computing platforms

Scientific discovery increasingly relies on computation through simulations, analytics, and machine and deep learning. Of these, simulations on high-performance computing (HPC) platforms have been the cornerstone of scientific computing for more than two decades. However, the development of simulation software has, in general, occurred through accretion, with a few exceptions. With an increase in scientific understanding, models have become more complex, rendering an accretion mode untenable to the point where software productivity and sustainability have become active concerns in scientific computing. In this survey paper, we examine a modest set of HPC scientific simulation applications that are already using cutting-edge HPC platforms. Several have been in existence for a decade or more. Our objective in this survey is twofold: first, to understand the landscape of scientific computing on HPC platforms in order to distill the currently scattered knowledge about software practices that have helped both developer and software productivity, and second, to understand the kind of tools and methodologies that need attention for continued productivity.