Gentoo Archives: gentoo-alt

From: Benda Xu <heroxbd@g.o>
To: gentoo-alt@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-alt] RFC: abstract for Conference on Computing in High Energy & Nuclear Physics
Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 15:42:18
Message-Id: 87zhnrk7cb.fsf@proton.d.airelinux.org
1 Dear all,
2
3 I am going to to submit an abstract on the use case of Gentoo Prefix to
4 Conference on Computing in High Energy & Nuclear Physics, to be held in
5 Australia. Please find the draft below. Comments before May 19 will be
6 reflected in the submitted version.
7
8 By default I am going to list the Prefix team as authors. Please reply
9 me if you want to add or remove yourself from the author list.
10
11 Thanks!
12 Benda
13
14 Gentoo Prefix as a physics software manager
15
16 In big physics experiments, as simulation, reconstruction and
17 analysis become more sophisticated, scientific reproducibility is
18 not a trivial task. Software is one of the biggest
19 challenges. Modularity is a common sense of software engineering to
20 facilitate quality and reusability of code. However, that often
21 introduces nested dependencies not obvious for physicists to work
22 with. Package manager is the widely practised solution to organize
23 dependencies systematically.
24
25 Portage from Gentoo Linux is both robust and flexible, and is highly
26 regarded by the free operating system community. In the form of
27 Gentoo Prefix, portage can be deployed by a normal user into a
28 directory prefix, on a workstation, cloud or supercomputing node.
29 Software is described by its build recipes along with dependency
30 relations. Real world use cases of Gentoo Prefix in neutrino and
31 dark matter experiments will be demonstrated, to show how physicists
32 could benefit from existing tools of proven superiority to guarantee
33 reproducibility in simulation, reconstruction and analysis of big
34 physics experiments.

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