SBIR-STTR Award

EP Analytics proposes to develop and commercialize the SEAL (for Secure Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)) framework that consists of software development, testing, quality and security assurance guidelines, and a toolkit of proprietary and third-party software. The framework enables transitioning of legacy codes to a modern ALM framework and develop and deploy modern and modular Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines supported through a collaborative software development platform (such as GitLab). The foundation of the SEAL framework has evolved from years of experience in software modernization and performance analysis of large complex HPC applications. Legacy codes come with unique dependencies, requirements, and complexities that can pose hurdles during the modernization process. These hurdles may be caused by technical (e.g., breaking changes during technology stack upgrade) or social (e.g., reluctance to rapid technical changes by key personnel) factors. Cognizant of these factors, a key design goal of the SEAL framework is to be extensible, technology agnostic, and incremental. SEAL will also treat performance analysis as a first-class citizen within the ALM process. This will be accomplished by analyzing the performance of tests as the codes evolve and notifying the developers of any performance degradations.

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) uses High-Fidelity (HF) computer codes, many of which are legacy codes that have evolved over many years, to investigate weapon effects phenomenology and techniques for countering Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). As DTRA’s reliance on HF codes for tasks critical to national security continues to increase, transitioning such codes from legacy coding practices to modern practices becomes paramount. This transition to modern practices through the use of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) frameworks will allow HF code developers to carefully monitor and control the evolution of the codes to ensure software development best practices are adopted, the code changes are thoroughly vetted for security, accuracy, and performance before the changes make their way into the mainline (or shared source code base) and released to the customers. EP Analytics is developing SEAL (for Secure ALM), which is a framework that enables transitioning legacy codes to a modern ALM framework. The foundation of the SEAL framework has evolved from years of experience in software modernization and performance analysis of large complex HPC applications. Legacy codes come with unique dependencies, requirements, and complexities that can pose hurdles during modernization. These hurdles may be caused by technical (e.g., breaking changes during technology stack upgrade) or social (e.g., reluctance to rapid technical changes by key personnel) factors. Cognizant of these factors, a key design goal of the SEAL framework is to be extensible, technology agnostic, and incremental. In Phase I, EP Analytics successfully demonstrated the feasibility of applying the SEAL framework to develop and demonstrate a working prototype of an automated CI/CD pipeline within an application container for SHAMRC, a legacy HF DTRA code. The automation entailed developing multiple enabling software artifacts/tools to support code builds, establishing test oracles (or truth values) for existing tests, executing tests, validating the test results, analyzing code coverage, and generating reports. EP Analytics and ARA tested the pipeline on multiple HPCMP systems (Narwhal, Onyx, and Mustang) and ARA’s local development cluster.