Reproducibility and Performance: Why Choose?

Abstract

Research processes often rely on high-performance computing (HPC), but HPC is often seen as antithetical to “reproducibility”: one would have to choose between software that achieves high performance and software that can be deployed in a reproducible fashion. However, by giving up on reproducibility we would give up on verifiability, a foundation of the scientific process. How can we conciliate performance and reproducibility? This article looks at two performance-critical aspects of HPC: message passing and CPU microarchitecture tuning. Engineering work that has gone into performance portability has already proved fruitful, but some areas remain unaddressed when it comes to CPU tuning. We propose package multiversioning, a technique developed for GNU Guix, a tool for reproducible software deployment, and show that it allows us to implement CPU tuning without compromising on reproducibility and provenance tracking.