New Blog: A Ladder to the Shoulders of Giants (Olive)
Much of today’s scientific research depends on digital laboratories – computing hardware and software that process the experimental data gathered by researchers. Yet, hardware and software evolve at a rapid pace and reproducing the results from a past experiment done even a couple of years ago is a tenuous proposition. Unless the original processing environment is maintained intact, even the original researchers may not be able to reproduce the exact results. And, the difficulty in creating an identical processing environment may preclude independent researchers from verifying the results of their peers. Our recent paper, Towards Reproducible Execution of Closed-Source Applications from Internet Archives, recounts the history of our ten year effort, known as Project Olive, to address the problem of processing environment archiving in service of reproducibility. It also discusses our recent work in this area which expands the problem of archiving to the problem of archive access – making it easy for a researcher to access and run the processing environment while still protecting the software and data from unauthorized use.