4–8 Nov 2019
Adelaide Convention Centre
Australia/Adelaide timezone

Gentoo Prefix as a physics software manager

5 Nov 2019, 14:15
15m
Riverbank R2 (Adelaide Convention Centre)

Riverbank R2

Adelaide Convention Centre

Oral Track 5 – Software Development Track 5 – Software Development

Speaker

Prof. Benda Xu (Tsinghua University)

Description

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 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.

Consider for promotion Yes

Primary author

Prof. Benda Xu (Tsinghua University)

Co-authors

Guilherme Amadio (CERN) Mr Fabian Groffen (Gentoo Linux) Mr Michael Haubenwallner (Gentoo Linux)

Presentation materials