FQL: An Extensible Feature Query Language and Toolkit on Searching Software Characteristics for HPC Applications

The amount of large-scale scientific computing software is dramatically increasing. In this work, we designed a new language, named feature query language (FQL), to collect and extract software features from a quick static code analysis. We designed and implemented an FQL toolkit to automatically detect and present the software features using an extensible query repository. Several large-scale, high performance computing (HPC) scientific codes have been used in the paper to demonstrate the HPC-related feature extraction and information collection. Although we emphasized the HPC features in the study, the toolkit can be easily extended to answer general software feature questions, such as coding pattern and hardware dependency.