A User-oriented Portable, Reproducible, and Scalable Software Ecosystem

2026-07-21

AI Summary

This work addresses the persistent challenge of inconsistent development and execution environments faced by researchers operating across heterogeneous computing platforms—ranging from laptops and workstations to supercomputers and cloud infrastructures. To overcome this, the authors propose a modular and portable software ecosystem featuring a unified command-line interface that enables seamless orchestration and execution of scientific workflows. The system ensures cross-platform consistency, reproducibility, and scalability, thereby streamlining computational research across diverse hardware configurations. Its practical efficacy has been demonstrated through successful integration into the plan4res project under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 initiative, where it effectively supported complex, large-scale scientific workflows in varied computing environments.

Abstract

It is normal for scientists to perform their research on a diverse set of hardware, ranging from laptops and workstations to supercomputers and cloud resources. The standard scenario requires a mix of these resources. In this paper we describe a software ecosystem that enables users to rely on the same development environment for running their workflows across the different computational resources. We describe a modular, unified command-line interface that allows for the interaction with a user-workflow across diverse hardware platform. The software ecosystem has been successfully tested as part of the plan4res EU H2020 project. It can be extended to other projects with similar requirements, so that they can benefit from the same approach for executing computational workflows.

Problem

• portable
• reproducible
• scalable
• software ecosystem
• computational workflows

Innovation

• portable
• reproducible
• scalable
• unified CLI
• workflow ecosystem