The Advanced Computational Testing and Simulation (ACTS) Toolkit is a set of computational tools developed primarily at DOE laboratories and is aimed at simplifying the solution of common and important computational problems. The use of the tools reduces the development time for new codes and the tools provide functionality that might not otherwise be available. This document outlines an agenda for expanding the scope of the ACTS Project based on lessons learned from current activities. Highlights of this agenda include peer-reviewed certification of new tools; finding tools to solve problems that are not currently addressed by the Toolkit; working in collaboration with other software initiatives and DOE computer facilities; expanding outreach efforts; promoting interoperability, further development of the tools; and improving functionality of the ACTS Information Center, among other tasks. The ultimate goal is to make the ACTS tools more widely used and more effective in solving DOE's and the nation's scientific problems through the creation of a reliable software infrastructure for scientific computing.

The ACTS Collection brings together a number of general-purpose computational tools that were developed by independent research projects mostly funded and supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. These tools tackle a number of common computational issues found in many applications, mainly implementation of numerical algorithms, and support for code development, execution and optimization. In this article, we introduce the numerical tools in the collection and their functionalities, present a model for developing more complex computational applications on top of ACTS tools, and summarize applications that use these tools. Lastly, we present a vision of the ACTS project for deployment of the ACTS Collection by the computational sciences community.

The ACTS Collection is a set of software tools that help developers or programmers write high performance parallel codes for their scientific applications. PyACTS is a Python-based interface to some of the tools in the ACTS Collection. The main purpose of developing PyACTS is to provide a uniform easy-to-use external interface to existing ACTS tools,and support ACTS users to rapidly prototype their codes with the tools. In particular, for users who are new to ACTS, they will find PyACTS helpful to test and try the functionality available in the collection. Further, this training will allow users to acquire the necessary experience to develop their own applications. In the current development phase of PyACTS, part of the ScaLAPACK subroutines are being made available. This report illustrates how we develop the idea of wrapping the ACTS Collection with a high level scripting language, like Python, and a status of the development of the Python front-end interface and future plans.