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Dear all, |
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I am going to to submit an abstract on the use case of Gentoo Prefix to |
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Conference on Computing in High Energy & Nuclear Physics, to be held in |
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Australia. Please find the draft below. Comments before May 19 will be |
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reflected in the submitted version. |
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By default I am going to list the Prefix team as authors. Please reply |
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me if you want to add or remove yourself from the author list. |
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Thanks! |
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Benda |
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Gentoo Prefix as a physics software manager |
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In big physics experiments, as simulation, reconstruction and |
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analysis become more sophisticated, scientific reproducibility is |
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not a trivial task. Software is one of the biggest |
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challenges. Modularity is a common sense of software engineering to |
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facilitate quality and reusability of code. However, that often |
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introduces nested dependencies not obvious for physicists to work |
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with. Package manager is the widely practised solution to organize |
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dependencies systematically. |
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|
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Portage from Gentoo Linux is both robust and flexible, and is highly |
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regarded by the free operating system community. In the form of |
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Gentoo Prefix, portage can be deployed by a normal user into a |
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directory prefix, on a workstation, cloud or supercomputing node. |
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Software is described by its build recipes along with dependency |
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relations. Real world use cases of Gentoo Prefix in neutrino and |
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dark matter experiments will be demonstrated, to show how physicists |
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could benefit from existing tools of proven superiority to guarantee |
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reproducibility in simulation, reconstruction and analysis of big |
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physics experiments. |