Re: [gentoo-alt] RFC: abstract for Conference on Computing in High Energy & Nuclear Physics

[Guilherme Amadio]

Hi Benda!

On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 11:42:12PM +0800, Benda Xu wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I am going to to submit an abstract on the use case of Gentoo Prefix to
> Conference on Computing in High Energy & Nuclear Physics, to be held in
> Australia.  Please find the draft below.  Comments before May 19 will be
> reflected in the submitted version.
>
> By default I am going to list the Prefix team as authors.  Please reply
> me if you want to add or remove yourself from the author list.

This is great. We really need to spread the word about prefix in the HEP
community. I'm not sure I will be able to make it to CHEP this year, but
I should be able to contribute to your paper/presentation if needed. I
have some prefix installations in CVMFS which I created as a demo for
last CHEP. I recommend you to compare portage with the other tools under
consideration like spack and nix, for example. I think the real use
cases are also a strong point to have. Another point where you may get
attention is support for other arches, like ARM and PPC, which some
experiments are looking into for their computing needs.

> Thanks!
> Benda
>
>   Gentoo Prefix as a physics software manager
>
>   In big physics experiments, as simulation, reconstruction and
>   analysis become more sophisticated, scientific reproducibility is
>   not a trivial task.  Software is one of the biggest
>   challenges. Modularity is a common sense of software engineering to
>   facilitate quality and reusability of code.  However, that often
>   introduces nested dependencies not obvious for physicists to work
>   with.  Package manager is the widely practised solution to organize
>   dependencies systematically.
>
>   Portage from Gentoo Linux is both robust and flexible, and is highly
>   regarded by the free operating system community.  In the form of
>   Gentoo Prefix, portage can be deployed by a normal user into a
>   directory prefix, on a workstation, cloud or supercomputing node.
>   Software is described by its build recipes along with dependency
>   relations.  Real world use cases of Gentoo Prefix in neutrino and
>   dark matter experiments will be demonstrated, to show how physicists
>   could benefit from existing tools of proven superiority to guarantee
>   reproducibility in simulation, reconstruction and analysis of big
>   physics experiments.

I have nothing to change in the above. Very nice abstract. I hope it
will be accepted by the organizers.

Cheers,
-Guilherme