The AMS Short Course on Reproducible Atmospheric Science Workflows Using Open Source Tools: An Introduction to the Popper Experimentation Protocol on Sunday January 7, 2017 preceding the 98th AMS Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas.
Currently, approaches to scientific research, including research in atmospheric science, require activities that take up much time but do not actually advance our scientific understanding. For example, researchers and their students spend countless hours reformatting data and writing code to attempt to reproduce previously published research. What if the scientific community could find a better way to create and publish our workflows, data, and models to minimize the amount of the time spent “reinventing the wheel”? Modern open source software development communities have created tools that make it easier to manage large codebases, allowing them to deal with high levels of complexity, not only in terms of managing code changes, but with the entire ecosystem that is needed in order to deliver changes to software in an agile, rapidly changing environment. These practices and tools are collectively referred to as DevOps. The Popper Experimentation Protocol repurposes the DevOps practice in the context of scientific explorations so that researchers can leverage existing tools and technologies to maintain and publish scientific analyses that are easy to reproduce.
The goal of this half-day course is to give an overview and introduction of The Popper Experimentation Protocol, a series of simple, easy-to-follow steps for implementing experiments following a DevOps approach. The second part of the course consists of a series of hands-on exercises in which the audience makes use of the Popper command-line tool in order to re-run an existing WRF execution using Git and Docker, as well as post-analysis using Jupyter (Python) notebooks. Additionally, attendants will learn how to make use of GitHub to upload and share their experiments, and TravisCI to continuously validate experiments.
The instructor for the course is PhD candidate Ivo Jimenez, UC Santa Cruz. He will be joined by Dr. Carlos Maltzahn, UC Santa Cruz and Mr. Kevin Tyle, University of Albany.
A luncheon will not be provided for this half-day short course
A laptop with Docker and Git pre-installed is required for this course.
This course complements well with the full-day AMS Short Course on Simplifying end-to-end numerical modeling using software containers (held on Saturday 6, 2017).
This course is affiliated with the 34th Conference on Environmental Information Processing Technologies (EIPT).
For more information please contact Mr. Kevin Tyle, Dept. of Atmospheric & Environmental Sciences, University at Albany, 518-442-4578, ktyle@albany.edu
All short course/workshop attendees must register and wear a badge/ribbon. Short course/workshop registration is not included in the 98th Annual Meeting registration, and short course/workshop registration does not include registration for the 98th AMS Annual Meeting.