On Friday, 23 December 2016 8:55:05 PM AEDT Craig Sanders via luv-main wrote:
On Fri, Dec 23, 2016 at 08:22:45PM +1100, russell@coker.com.au wrote:
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.
it was a big issue when i was at unimelb (where i built a HPC cluster for the chemistry dept and later worked on the nectar research cloud).
depending on the funding source or the journal that papers were published in, raw data typically had to be stored for at least 7 or 12 years, and the exact same software used to process it also had to be kept available and runnable (which was an ongoing problem, especially with some of the commercial software like gaussian...but even open source stuff is affected by bit-rot and also by CADT-syndrome. we had a source license for gaussian, but that didn't guarantee that we could even compile it with newer compilers.
Debian/Unstable has a new version of GCC that has deprecated a lot of the older STL interfaces. It also has a kernel that won't work with the amd64 libc from Wheezy. These are upstream issues so other distributions may have dealt with them in some ways. It should be possible to change the Wheezy libc to the newer amd64 system call interface without changing much and using kvm or Xen is a possibility too. Also compiling against the old STL isn't that hard to do, and Debian has good support for multiple versions of GCC. The STL isn't necessarily a trivial issue. I recall that Wheezy stopped getting security support for Chromium because upstream (Google) decided to just make new releases which depended on new C++ features that weren't in the Wheezy version of GCC. Supporting old versions of software is the usual requirement and that's usually a lot easier. But I can imagine a situation where part of the tool-chain for scientific computing had a bug that was only fixed in a new upstream release that required a new compiler. Speaking for myself I'm having enough trouble making the software I'm responsible work on all the newer versions of compilers etc. I don't give much thought to backwards compatability. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/