The ACTS collection robust and high-performance tools for scientific computing: Guidelines for tool inclusion and retirement

In 1999, the PITAC Report recommended the creation of a national library of certified domain-specific software in order to reduce the labor required for software development, testing and evolution (some of those recommendations were later implemented by the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program. From interactions with many computational scientists and industry we have realized that ACTS has the potential of becoming a major player in such an activity. Computer vendors and a great part of the scientific computing community are already familiar with at least a couple of the ACTS tools. The implementation of the peer-reviewed certification will push the frontiers of the tools forward, and the tools or subsets of the tools will be eventually integrated in vendor-supported software libraries.We seek to work with tool developers and leading computational scientists in defining the criteria to be used in the certification process. In this paper we present an initial set of parameters to carry out such a process