A Look at PFLOTRAN's Cloud-Based Continuous Integration

Continuous integration can play a valuable role in sustainable software development when properly utilized. Through continuous integration, source code and documentation can be automatically downloaded, compiled, and tested against a gold standard prior to deployment. One potential challenge with continuous integration is the ongoing maintenance of supporting software and hardware infrastructure, which may be routine for IT specialists, but somewhat bothersome for domain scientists. However, frameworks exist within cloud computing that greatly facilitate continuous integration, many of which are free to open source code development projects.

The PFLOTRAN project has leveraged continuous integration since 2012. PFLOTRAN is a massively-parallel, subsurface reactive multiphase flow and transport simulator founded upon the PETSc framework. PFLOTRAN has been developed under open source GNU LGPL licensing for over ten years. According to OpenHub, PFLOTRAN is composed of over three hundred thousand lines of source code generated through an estimated 83 years of effort (COCOMO model) by an international group of 36 contributors. The project leverages several cloud resources (i.e. Bitbucket, Codeship, Github and Travis CI) to automatically build, test, and deploy PFLOTRAN source code and documentation. This presentation will detail the project’s cloud-based implementation of continuous integration. SAND2018-8861 A.