Reproducible and User-Controlled Software Environments in HPC with Guix
This addresses reproducibility challenges for HPC users and support teams, though it is incremental as it applies an existing paradigm to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of irreproducible software environments in high-performance computing (HPC) by introducing GNU Guix and functional package management, demonstrating improved reproducibility and sharing for researchers through representative use cases.
Support teams of high-performance computing (HPC) systems often find themselves between a rock and a hard place: on one hand, they understandably administrate these large systems in a conservative way, but on the other hand, they try to satisfy their users by deploying up-to-date tool chains as well as libraries and scientific software. HPC system users often have no guarantee that they will be able to reproduce results at a later point in time, even on the same system-software may have been upgraded, removed, or recompiled under their feet, and they have little hope of being able to reproduce the same software environment elsewhere. We present GNU Guix and the functional package management paradigm and show how it can improve reproducibility and sharing among researchers with representative use cases.