The PETSc Community Is the Infrastructure

Abstract

The communities who develop and support open source scientific software packages are crucial to the utility and success of such packages. Moreover, these communities form an important part of the human infrastructure that enables scientific progress. This paper discusses aspects of the PETSc (Portable Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation) community, its organization, and technical approaches that enable community members to help each other efficiently.To meet the technological challenges of the 21st century, the simultaneous revolutions in data science and computing architectures need to be mirrored by a revolution in scientific simulation that provides flexible, scalable, multiphysics multiscale capabilities in both traditional and new areas. This simulation technology rests on a foundation of numerical algorithms and software for Computing in Science and Engineering