ReproNB: Reproducibility of Interactive Notebook Systems

Project Idea Description

• Topics: HPC, MPI, distributed systems
• Skills: C++, Python
• Difficulty: Difficult
• Size: Large; 350 hours
• Mentors: Tanu Malik

Notebooks have gained wide popularity in scientific computing. A notebook is both a web-based interactive front- end to program workflows and a lightweight container for sharing code and its output. Reproducing notebooks in different target environments, however, is a challenge. Notebooks do not share the computational environment in which they are executed. Consequently, despite being shareable they are often not reproducible. We have developed FLINC (see also eScience'22 paper) to address this problem. However, it currently does not support all forms of experiments, especially those relating to HPC experiments. In this project we will extend FLINC to HPC experiments. This will involve using recording and replaying mechanisms such as ReMPI and rr within FLINC.

Project Deliverable

The project deliverable will be a set of HPC experiments that are packaged with FLINC and available on Chamaeleon.