Series of webinars on reproducible research. Episode IX. Experimental Testbeds in Computer Science

To improve our practice in terms of reproducible research, some colleagues and I organize a series of webinars where we will share our experience and thoughts and on those different themes. These webinars are open to anyone (PhD students, post-doc, engineers, researchers, …) and will be in English (possibly with a strong French accent ;-). The precedent ones have addressed various topics such as:

• the management of a laboratory notebook and of replicable articles,
• the control of an environment,
• numerical reproducibility,
• activity logging and backing up,
• software and data archiving.
• reproducible science in bioinformatics.
• publication Modes Favoring Reproducible Research.
• artifact evaluation in computer systems' conferences.

 All the slides and videos are available here: https://github.com/alegrand/RR_webinars

The next webinar will be given by Lucas Nussbaum (Lorraine University,member of the Grid5000 architectural and technical board, formerDebian Project Leader) on "Experimental Testbeds in Computer Science".

Computer scientists working on the design of hardware and softwarearchitectures and in particular on the design of distributedarchitectures (network, high performance computing, cloud, sensornetworks, IoT, etc.) need to evaluate the relevance of their proposalat scale on a regular basis. Hence, their practice relies on frequentexperimental evaluations, which leads to specific needs in term ofexperimental control. In this context, reproducing the work of othercolleagues happens to be very difficult as it requires not only tohave precise information about experimental conditions (softwarestack, external load, hardware type and configuration, etc.) but alsoto have a testbed allowing to recreate similar experimentalconditions.  A few experimental testbeds allowing for fine-grainexperimental control have been built in the last decade (Grid5000,R2Lab, …). Such testbeds are mutualized and generally open-access,which makes it possible to compare in a fair and truthful wayalternative approaches at large scale.

In this webinar, Lucas Nussbaum will provide an overview of theseprojects and of their internals.

It will take place on Tuesday 6th June 2017, from 1:30PM to 4:30PM (UTC+1) in the amphitheater of the IMAG building in Grenoble. It will be screencast and interactions during the presentations will take place through written interactive documents (pad, hangout, …). The resulting videos will be edited within a few days for a better exploitation by people that would not have been able to attend the event. All the information are gathered here: https://github.com/alegrand/RR_webinars/blob/master/9_experimental_testbeds/index.org.

If you are interested in following these talks, you should check on the previous web page whether a room has been reserved nearby and, if not, book one and update the web page accordingly as it is always much more fun/easy to learn in company of others rather than alone in a dark office. :)

We hope to see you soon.
Best,
Arnaud Legrand