PresQT Workshop 1: Whole Tale Lightning Talk by Jarek Nabrzyski
Channel: Natalie Meyers
Date: 2017-05-07

A talk about Capturing the “Whole Tale” of Computational Research and the Whole Tale project given by Jarek Nabryzski at the PresQT Workshop May 1, 2017 at the University of Notre Dame. 

Nabrzyski presents an overview of the NSF-funded DIBBs project “Merging Science and Cyberinfrastructure Pathways: The Whole Tale” (NSF award #1541450). Whole Tale is building a cyberinfrastructure that seamlessly provides computational tools for tackling pressing research problems in a way that is scalable and reproducible but that still uses software familiar to researchers. The project's aim is to support scientific investigation at all computational scales, from HPC environments to single-user endeavors (the “long tail” of science). 

Whole Tale aims to provide a research environment that captures and, at the time of publication, exposes salient details of the research via access to persistent versions of the data and code used, workflow provenance, data lineage,parameter settings, and output data. 

The project is committed to open source development and supports existing scientific tools and infrastructure, and plans for users to be able to customize and install specialized software. 

The environment will provide linkages to existing data repositories such as DataONE, data management services such as Globus, data analysis and visualization tools such as yt, and various computational cyberinfrastructure providers such as the Texas Advanced Computing Center and NCSA. 

In addition, it instruments the cyberinfrastructure environment with workflow and reproducibility tools to aid in capturing and storing key scripts, function calls, parameter settings and machine state information that are essential for reproducing the results. 

"WholeTale’s greatest benefits may be obtained from the collection of scientifically oriented microservices, such as data access, project-specific code curation, and persistent identifier creation, along with an interoperable open source software platform that could be built upon and extended by various software infrastructures for preservation of science outcomes.

Project Collaborators include: Adam Brinckman, Kyle Chard, Niall Gaffney, Mihael Hatigan, Matthew Jones, Kacper Kowalik, Sivakumar Kulasekaran, BertramLudäscher, Jarek Nabrzyski*, Victoria Stodden, Ian Taylor, Matthew Turk