POSE: Phase I: Tapis Advancing Collaborative Open Source (TACOS)

Award ID: 2229614

The advanced computing infrastructure landscape has evolved tremendously with many sophisticated capabilities for tackling the world's most challenging computing problems. But with that sophistication comes complexity. The Tapis Framework provides a hosted, unified web-based API for securely managing computational workloads across institutions so that experts can focus on their research instead of the technology needed to accomplish it. The Tapis Advancing Collaborative Open Source (TACOS) initiative seeks to explore transforming Tapis into a self-sustaining organization. TACOS will look for the tools, services, and infrastructure support needed to transform into an Open Source Ecosystem (OSE) and enable Tapis to expand to a collaborative and asynchronous development environment. The Tapis platform allows easier implementation, sharing and re-use of complex computational applications, workflows, and infrastructure and enables analysis previously too challenging for researchers. Tapis maximizes application portability, allowing flexible scheduling of geographically distributed computational workloads, offering a HTTP-based RESTful API science-as-a-service to enable multi-facility, decentralized deployments, and provide production-grade support for sensors and streaming data. By transforming Tapis to an Open Source Ecosystem, Tapis leadership will establish organization and governance structures along with contribution pathways and processes for the greater community ecosystem, including reusable Tapis artifacts such as containerized functions, applications and Jupyter notebooks, in addition to the core code base. Tools to accelerate community development, such as push-button sandbox environments, template and scaffold libraries for SDK, CLI and user interfaces, will also be identified and adopted. The projects primary objectives will be to grow and strengthen the engagement of developer communities to provide long-term sustainment. These engagements will look at opportunities to shift the community from not only being users of Tapis but also contributors to Tapis. The project team believes deeply in the power and importance of an open, inclusive, community driven approach to software development, and the POSE program will enable us to create inroads to direct engagement by the developer community. By making Tapis an OSE, going beyond source code, Tapis will evolve to an ecosystem of components that the community can contribute to at any level of expertise. To this end the project will engage beyond existing user base and pursue community members amongst teaching intensive institutes and EPSCOR communities via student mentoring and hackathons to broaden outreach and create opportunities to contribute to the Tapis ecosystem. Further details about the Tapis project can be found on https://tapis-project.org/ including a getting started guide at https://tapis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/. The wider Tapis community is available to join using Slack at: http://bit.ly/join-tapis 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.

NSF Program Director: Deepankar Medhi