Reproducibility is a core component of the research process -- it allows
researchers to verify results, build upon them, and teach newcomers the
methods of a given field. But the truth is reproducibility when the
research is done on a computer can be very painful to achieve for a number
of reasons. To be computationally reproducible, researchers must generate a
compendium that encapsulates all the inputs needed to correctly reproduce
their work: the data, a complete specification of the research and its
steps, and information about the originating computational environment (OS,
hardware architecture, and library dependencies). For secondary users of
their work, even with a compendium in their hands, it may be hard to
reproduce the results. There may be no instructions about how to execute
the code and explore it further; the analyses may not run on their
operating system; there may be missing software libraries; software
versions may be different; and several issues may arise while trying to
install all the required dependencies.
In this talk, we'll discuss ReproZip, an open source tool built to help
alleviate these problems by allowing the user to easily capture all the
necessary components in a single, distributable bundle. ReproZip allows you
to pack your research along with all necessary data files, software,
software libraries, environment variables, and more. Then anybody can
reproduce the research on a different machine, without tracking down and
installing the dependencies, or even having to run the same operating
system! ReproZip works by tracing the systems calls used by the experiment
to automatically identify which files should be included. Users can review
and edit this list before creating the final bundle. These ReproZip files
can be reproduced in different ways via plugins -- right now, ReproZip can
use Vagrant, Docker, and Singularity to reproduce results across operating
systems. We'll also discuss ReproServer, a web application that makes
unpacking and interacting with the contents of ReproZip bundles even
easier, by allowing users to reproduce ReproZip bundles from the comfort of
their browser.
