The Software Tools Ecosystem Project (STEP) is a US Department of Energy initiative to provide the ongoing support and enhancement needed for critical High Performance Computing (HPC) software tools to remain effective, efficient, and relevant in the rapidly evolving field of HPC.  We define Tools to mean the collection of software packages that can be applied to monitor, analyze, and diagnose performance and behavior of computational science applications and systems.

Tools are closely bound to architectures and system software in ways that other types of software, such as libraries and scientific applications, are not. For example, a tool that tracks how an application uses computing resources must be able to measure low-level architectural events and metrics and relate them to program progress and source code. As a result, tools must closely track changes to applications, architectures, and their software stacks. To complicate matters, the need for tools is most acute for understanding code performance on systems that push the boundaries of technology and scale, but these systems’ novelty makes them extremely difficult for tool developers to support when first deployed. The advent of exascale systems, increases in architectural diversity, and additional complexity driven by heterogenity, all make providing effective tools for use by scientists and engineers essential to avoid impeding scientific discovery.