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
