Science Software Sustainability Roundtable: Perspectives on Approaches to Sustainability

The notion of sustainable scientific software is gaining traction as an important topic to consider as part of the science data enterprise. However, at least one challenge arises almost immediately  which is how to define sustainability and what approach to take to ensure the sustainability of software.

Science practices have become increasingly reliant on software as the scientific community has acquired strong habits for using computer information systems to conduct the work of science. Software has become pervasive in science and includes software systems, services, and products that have been adopted, software that must be enhancd, and software that must be newly created.  Our software must be sustainable if we expect to rely on its use for the foreseeable future.

In this roundtable, we will seek insight from a number of perspectives on the sustainability of science software. We hope to obtain this insight by answering several questions that have been asked by science stakeholders on the sustainability of science software.