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

[Michael Everitt]

On 12/05/19 16:42, 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.
>
> 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.
>
Fantastic! It would be great to see this appearing on the Gentoo PR
channels too! :]

MJE