C.A.M. Gerlach

PhD students, postdocs and independent researchers often struggle when trying to scale their code and data beyond their local machine, to a HPC cluster or the cloud.

PhD students, postdocs and independent researchers often struggle when trying to execute code developed locally in the cloud or HPC clusters for better performance. This is even more difficult if they can't count on IT staff to set up the necessary infrastructure for them on the remote machine, which is common in third-world countries.

In the open-source community, the security of software packages is a critical concern since it constitutes a significant portion of the global digital infrastructure. This BoF session will focus on the supply chain security of open-source software in scientific computing.

Scientific environments and IDEs for Python have grown significantly in complexity in recent years, adding many features found in traditional IDEs such as debuggers, LSP support, plugin management, Git clients, testing integration, and more. This adds functionality that users are asking for, but also makes them more complicated for users without those needs.

"Notebooks can be a powerful tool for the purposes for which they were designed—learning, experimenting, and sharing results. However, users face many challenges when trying to achieve true reproducbility with notebooks alone, including lack of dependency management, pitfalls of non-linear interactive execution, and requiring bespoke tooling to open and execute.

"Python packaging is a rapidly changing landscape, plagued by many hurdles and challenges for users. The scientific Python community faces some of the greatest difficulties of anyone here, given the high reliance on external binaries and compiled code, the diversity of packaging ecosystems (PyPI, Conda, others), and the fact that many if not most users are not professional software engineers,...

With the tremendous growth of the Python ecosystem, attracting an ever-wider audience of users with a variety of backgrounds and experience levels, it is more critical than ever that its documentation better serve the needs of its diverse array of readers.