Re: Use guix to distribute data & reproducible (data) science

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hi Amirouche,

Amirouche Boubekki <amirouche@hypermove.net> skribis:

> On 2018-02-09 18:13, ludovic.courtes@inria.fr wrote:
>> Hi!
>>
>> Amirouche Boubekki <amirouche@hypermove.net> skribis:
>>
>>> tl;dr: Distribution of data and software seems similar.
>>>        Data is more and more important in software and reproducible
>>>        science. Data science ecosystem lakes resources sharing.
>>>        I think guix can help.
>>
>> I think some of us especially Guix-HPC folks are convinced about the
>> usefulness of Guix as one of the tools in the reproducible science
>> toolchain (that was one of the themes of my FOSDEM talk).  :-)
>>
>> Now, whether Guix is the right tool to distribute data, I don’t know.
>> Distributing large amounts of data is a job in itself, and the store
>> isn’t designed for that.  It could quickly become a bottleneck.
>
> What does it mean technically that the store “isn't designed for that”?

There are several potential issues.  One is GC: how convenient is it to
have big datasets subject to GC?  Another one is I/O bottleneck: when
adding a file to the store, you currently do an ‘add-to-store’ RPC to
the daemon, pass it the file name, which the daemon then reads entirely
to compute its content hash; could be an issue with big datasets.

HTH,
Ludo’.