Home // CENTRIC 2019, The Twelfth International Conference on Advances in Human-oriented and Personalized Mechanisms, Technologies, and Services // View article

Infrastructure-as-Code for Scientific Computing Environments

Authors:
Daniel Gomes
Pedro Mestre
Carlos Serodio

Keywords: IaC; devops; infrastructure-as-code; configuration script; continuous deployment; continuous delivery; continuous integration; reproducible research.

Abstract:
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is receiving a lot of attention because of the positive results demonstrated in environment provisioning that supports both corporate and scientific applications. One of the biggest challenges related to the software development that supports scientific research projects is to obtain similar results to those that were published when that research is reproduced. Obtaining the same results involves recreating the same computational environment as the one used by the original researchers, and IaC is a paradigm that can help on this issue. In this paper, the authors provide a state-of-the-art and a literature review on IaC. Some work done on infrastructure provisioning based on IaC is presented and analyzed. A section shows how IaC can solve some typical issues on scientific computational environments. In other words, it is described how IaC practices were applied in a real case. Based on what is presented in this paper, and considering the scientific context, the use of IaC can help in many aspects like the quality of the developed software and the improvement of the results obtained in reproducible research.

Pages: 7 to 10

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2019

Publication date: November 24, 2019

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-3492

ISBN: 978-1-61208-754-2

Location: Valencia, Spain

Dates: from November 24, 2019 to November 28, 2019