Deterministic Workflows project

[Grigori Fursin]

My colleagues from UPenn & Indiana University started a new project on
Deterministic Workflows: https://iu-parfunc.github.io/detbox-project .

Here is a brief description of this project:

Efforts at software reproducibility focus usually start with archiving
datasets and virtual machines. However, there remains an overlooked
source of irreproducibility: execution nondeterminism. Unless we force
software, at runtime, to depend only on reproducible features of the
physical machine and operating system, future executions may crash in
new ways or give different answers. In the Deterministic Workflows
project, we aim to provide this missing piece for complete, airtight
reproducibility. We have built deployable, user-space solutions for
determinizing preexisting, binary Linux-x86 programs using runtime
sandboxing.  So far we've applied the
technology to build and test more than twelve thousand Debian packages
employing various languages and libraries.  Archiving the determinism
sandbox along with the software guarantees that individual software
executions remain reproducible in the future.