Re: Building a software toolchain that works

[Yasuaki Kudo <yasu@yasuaki.com>]

Hi,

I posted something similar recently but I know there are 100s of banks and hedge funds alike that run daily calculations on arrays of servers , and they have very tricky changes in both software and data, daily.

Do you think Guix(HPC - i don't know what specializations go there 😅) can be the prime tool for the job?

-Yasu

> On Mar 15, 2022, at 17:25, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi!
> 
> Olivier Dion via "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System
> distribution." <guix-devel@gnu.org> skribis:
> 
>> On another note, what I find fascinating is why Guix and Nix are not
>> more used in academic papers.  A quick search on the Compendex database
>> gives me only a handful of papers referencing Guix, mostly all from
>> Ludovic.  I simply can't understand this.  You have a way to factor out
>> the toolchain from the equation of your research's resuls -- making it
>> trivial to reproduce -- and yet every papers that I read is using some
>> Ubuntu LTS or Fedora as their build and testing environment.
> 
> This is what we’re pushing as part of the Guix-HPC effort¹.  Ricardo’s
> research team, for instance, has published bioinfo papers that build on
> Guix for reproducibility.  Colleagues of mine in HPC (linear algebra and
> run-time systems) are also starting to do this.
> 
> That’s still very much niche, but there’s growing awareness of how tools
> like Guix can help build reproducible research workflows.  The next thing
> for us is to provide tools and documents to make it more approachable.
> 
> Ludo’.
> 
> ¹ https://hpc.guix.info
>