Everware toolkit. Supporting reproducible science and challenge-driven education (1703.01200v1)

Abstract: Modern science clearly demands for a higher level of reproducibility and collaboration. To make research fully reproducible one has to take care of several aspects: research protocol description, data access, environment preservation, workflow pipeline, and analysis script preservation. Version control systems like git help with the workflow and analysis scripts part. Virtualization techniques like Docker or Vagrant can help deal with environments. Jupyter notebooks are a powerful platform for conducting research in a collaborative manner. We present project Everware that seamlessly integrates git repository management systems such as Github or Gitlab, Docker and Jupyter helping with a) sharing results of real research and b) boosts education activities. With the help of Everware one can not only share the final artifacts of research but all the depth of the research process. This been shown to be extremely helpful during organization of several data analysis hackathons and machine learning schools. Using Everware participants could start from an existing solution instead of starting from scratch. They could start contributing immediately. Everware allows its users to make use of their own computational resources to run the workflows they are interested in, which leads to higher scalability of the toolkit.