Morning Session: Provenance

From ALPS

Talks

• Chair: Vito Scarola
• Speakers
  • Vito Scarola
    • CCM <-> Hunters & gatherers
    • Reproducibility
    • What to keep for each algorithm? (create table in discussion)
    • VisTrails: storing information automatically
  • Juliana Freire
    • Trustworthiness of the results: assessment requires provenance
    • Reproducability also requires storing at least software versions, or even virtual machines

Discussion

• Vito's ALPS example: bose Hubbard model
• Idea: let report be paradigm for provenance in computational CM research
• VisTrail's allows documentation of boxes (infrastructure is there); this can be done in the code
• Provide examples in the report
  • Pointers to other potential provenance models
  • Make a real set of examples
• Where does the logging take place?
  • Every execution is logged
  • Into files, databases, ...
• Matthias: not too detailed at this stage
  • Coarse-grained view of the problem
• Remote execution is possible
• Integration with ALPS scheduler?
• Two important questions: What do I/What do others have to do to reproduce data?
  • Having everything in the paper will make it more messy
• ALPS can have a standardized format; other people need not follow
• Workflow need not know about intermediate files, checkpoints, etc.
  • How much the user wants to say remains in his own hands
• Keeping the script is also a way of recording provenance
• Providing the code?
  • In context with ALPS code: what if somebody screwed up using ALPS?
  • Have a licence: publications with ALPS code must include code
  • The focus is reproducability
  • Will one want to make the latest discovery available?
    • Guifre: you will want to keep your small secrets
    • Matthias: should we stick to this paradigm?
      • Should we be forced to do that?
    • Rajiv: The person who write the code is still in advantage when applying it to other models
    • Two paradigms:
      • Publish nice, polished codes?
      • Ugly working codes?
    • Already now some journals require source code
    • Public code will increase number of citations (significantly)