Whole Tale http://wholetale.org is a web-based, open-source platform for reproducible research supporting the creation, sharing, execution, and verification of Tales for the scientific research community. Tales are executable research objects that capture the code, data, and environment along with narrative and workflow information needed to re-create computational results from scientific studies. Creating reproducible research objects that enable reproducibility, transparency, and re-execution for computational experiments requiring significant compute resources or utilizing massive data is an especially challenging open problem. We describe opportunities, challenges, and solutions to facilitating reproducibility for data- and compute-intensive research, that we call Tales at Scale, using the Whole Tale computing platform. We highlight challenges and solutions in frontend responsiveness needs, gaps in current middleware design and implementation, network restrictions, containerization, and data access. Finally, we discuss challenges in packaging computational experiment implementations for portable data-intensive Tales and outline future work.
Many astronomy data centres still work on filesystems. Industry has moved on; current practice in computing infrastructure is to achieve Big Data scalability using object stores rather than POSIX file systems. This presents us with opportunities for portability and reuse of software underlying processing and archive systems but it also causes problems for legacy implementations in current data centers.
We present an overview of the recently funded Merging Science and Cyberinfrastructure Pathways: The Whole Tale project (NSF award #1541450). Our approach has two nested goals: 1) deliver an environment that enables researchers to create a complete narrative of the research process including exposure of the data-to-publication lifecycle, and 2) systematically and persistently link research publications to their associated digital scholarly objects such as the data, code, and workflows. To enable this, Whole Tale will create an environment where researchers can collaborate on data, workspaces, and workflows and then publish them for future adoption or modification. Published data and applications will be consumed either directly by users using the Whole Tale environment or can be integrated into existing or future domain Science Gateways.
