Abstract

Contributed Talk - Splinter EScience

Tuesday, 12 September 2023, 15:40   (H 3005)

SciTrace: an approach to reuseability for scientific workflows in astronomy

Y. Fournier, K. Makan, O. Michaelis, A. Galkin, H. Henke
Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics

Reuseability of softwares is one important aspect in scientific projects. How to maintain coherence of project softwares over decades of development and team full turn-over? How to to reuse or adapt processes requiring legacy softwares? More generally, how to make such work reusable by other scientists (from the same field or cross disciplinary) ? The SciTrace software addresses the problem of reuseability by capturing the involved processes, and packing them in the form of a SciTrace package. The package can be easily shared and and seamlessly deployed on a large variety of infrastructures with containerization capabilities. The packaging and deployment are taking advantage of modern cloud-native technologies: dockerization, cloud-computing and cloud-storage. In the frame of the PUNCH4NFDI project a prototype as been developed and experiments already demonstrate the usefulness of this tool, which is still under development. The SciTrace software facilitates the process of making scientific research reuseable. Especially in astronomy: using IVOA services and the PROVenance-enhanced SciTrace-format allows publication of fully FAIR software and data. The concepts behind the software will be presented, as well as the SciTrace-format, and its current implementation.