On Friday, 23 December 2016 8:13:02 PM AEDT Andrew Mather via luv-main wrote:
It's not uncommon in scientific computing to need multiple versions of compilers and various bits of software compiled against a range of different libraries and the like. You have to retain old versions of software, often long past its use-by date in case someone queries a scientific paper based on using that particular version.
If you are particularly concerned about such things you wouldn't want to have a system where lots of different versions of the software were installed side by side. You would want a VM/chroot image with the exact software in question. The amount of storage space isn't an issue by today's standards. A plain text representation of a human DNA scan is 3G which is probably larger than the complete OS and all software needed to analyse it. But if you really want to reproduce things you need a copy of the same hardware (different releases of CPU families can give different floating point answers etc) and the same OS kernel. I've heard a lot of scientific computing people talk about a desire to reproduce calculations, but I haven't heard them talking about these issues so I presume that they haven't got far in this regard. http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-reproducibility-... Not that it matters, minor issues like these pale into insignificance when compared to the above. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/