Aleem Uddin, Greg D’arcy, Steven Manos, Mark Gray, David Powell, Paul Coddington, Jake Yip, Ping Chen
Software containers and related technologies are trending in industry and in the research sector. The advantages to the research sector includes reproducibility, scalability and ability to realise research platforms via container orchestration.
To address these opportunities, the Australian Research Container Orchestration Service (ARCOS) community was formed in early 2000. Through community consultation a four tiered governance approach was adopted. This session briefs the impact of the four tiered approach involving community awareness raising, best practices, user support, and user experience. In this session, we seek audience advice from the audience in shaping the community’s future.
Furthermore the session also introduces the SCiDir initiative, which is proposing to develop a secure scientific software distribution system based on CernVM-FS. SciDir proposes to develop an open-source, community-oriented project that addresses the issues of accessibility and reproducibility of scientific software and containers made available via the proposed repository. SciDir builds on the existing Neurodesk and BioCommons projects efforts which has a working proof of concept implementation. Through community consultation and collaboration the SciDir initiative intends to address required infrastructure (stratum 0 & 1), governance and security issues.
This session provides the audience an opportunity to be involved in two discussions, firstly shaping the future of ARCOS community and secondly community engagement on SCiDir initiative in hosting a scientific software and container repository.