The goal of the NHSE is to promote software sharing within and across
HPCC agency programs on a sustainable basis [6].
The NHSE can best accomplish this goal by providing the repository
maintenance and interoperation infrastructure for a set
of domain-specific HPCC repositories,
and by helping domain experts to populate their repositories with
high quality software and information.
Domain experts are the best qualified to select, evaluate,
catalog, and provide access to software within their specialized
domains.
An example of a domain-specific repository is the popular Netlib
repository of mathematical software
[7].
The NHSE will link together these domain specific repositories
and provide access to them for the HPCC community in a convenient way.
The intended audience of the NHSE is the HPCC user community, consisting of Grand Challenge research teams, other government and academic researchers, users of supercomputer centers, and industrial users. Software sharing within the NHSE is intended to be both intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary. The expected benefits of the NHSE are reduction of duplication of time and effort in software development and faster production of higher quality software.
The purpose of this document is to give guidelines for the development of domain-specific HPCC repositories that will provide access to software and documents within their specific domains, as well as interoperate with each other and with the top-level NHSE interface. Specific guidelines are given for scoping the domain, classifying and cataloging software, access mechanisms and control, securing the repository site(s), interoperation, measurement, and ongoing maintenance and development. Guidelines for developing and utilizing a domain-specific software review framework that extends the top-level NHSE software review framework are contained in a separate document entitled the NHSE Software Review Framework.
To facilitate the development of domain-specific repositories, a toolkit called Repository in a Box (RIB) is under development by the NHSE, and the first version is expected to be released in September 1996. This version will contain tools for the following: