{"id":5827,"date":"2015-07-27T22:17:35","date_gmt":"2015-07-27T21:17:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=5827"},"modified":"2015-07-27T22:17:35","modified_gmt":"2015-07-27T21:17:35","slug":"what-affect-will-windows-10-forced-updates-have-on-research-software","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=5827","title":{"rendered":"What affect will Windows 10 forced updates have on Research Software?"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you change it, It will break<\/strong><\/p>\n

“It only works on the Windows version of MATLAB 2010a. The code doesn’t work on Linux or other versions of MATLAB.”\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>explained the researcher. He needed to run his program hundreds of times and his solution was to lock himself into a computer room over the weekend, log into the two dozen managed desktop machines there and manually start his code running on each one. Along with colleagues from the University of Manchester, I was trying to understand why he couldn’t use the Linux-based 3000+ core Condor pool<\/a> we’d built since it was perfectly suited to his workflow.<\/p>\n

Now, when he said ‘doesn’t work<\/strong><\/em>‘ what he meant was ‘gives different results’\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>and the only ones he liked were the ones that came from MATLAB 2010a on Windows. Naturally, I offered to take a look at his code with a view to figuring out what was going on but he simply wasn’t interested. Once he determined that we couldn’t (or more accurately, wouldn’t) stop his current workflow he thanked us for our interest and left.<\/p>\n

Different strokes<\/del>\u00a0results for different folks<\/strong><\/p>\n

This wasn’t the first time I had discovered research code that gave different results when run on different operating systems or runtimes and it probably won’t be the last. A relatively high profile case that caught my eye recently was a publication that demonstrated that the results of a program called FreeSurfer varied<\/a> according to operating system, workstation type and software version.<\/p>\n

I suspect that the phenomenon might be more prevalent than we think because I suspect (but confess to having no evidence) that a large number of computational research results come from research code that’s only ever been run on one operating system, with one set of dependencies on one particular piece of hardware.<\/p>\n

Experience has shown me that some researchers deal with this lack of robustness by keeping their working environment as constant as possible. Don’t. Touch. Anything!<\/p>\n

The shifting sands of Windows 10<\/strong><\/p>\n

A huge percentage of researchers conduct their research using Windows and the Windows environment is about to change in a rather fundamental way: Updates will be automatic and mandatory<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Since the operating system will be constantly shifting under their feet, researchers are no longer going to be able to keep that aspect of their environment stable.<\/p>\n

I wonder if or how this will change things in the world of research software. Perhaps it will go by unnoticed, perhaps more test-suites will be written or perhaps something else?<\/p>\n

Any thoughts?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you change it, It will break “It only works on the Windows version of MATLAB 2010a. The code doesn’t work on Linux or other versions of MATLAB.”\u00a0explained the researcher. He needed to run his program hundreds of times and his solution was to lock himself into a computer room over the weekend, log into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[80,67,66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rse","category-scientific-software","category-windows"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3swhs-1vZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5827"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5827\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5841,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5827\/revisions\/5841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}