Deployment of High Energy Physics software with a standard method

TL;DR

This paper presents a standardized, reliable method for deploying high energy physics software using RPM packages, simplifying installation and maintenance across multiple Linux distributions.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive RPM-based deployment approach for HEP software, with tested repositories for various Linux distributions, promoting wider adoption and collaboration.

Findings

Precompiled HEP software packages are easily deployable.

The approach works across openSUSE, RHEL clones, and Fedora.

It facilitates software maintenance and updates in HEP research.

Abstract

The installation and maintenance of scientific software for research in experimental, phenomenological, and theoretical High Energy Physics (HEP) requires a considerable amount of time and expertise. While many tools are available to make the task of installation and maintenance much easier, many of these tools require maintenance on their own, have little documentation and very few are used outside of HEP community. For the installation and maintenance of the software, we rely on the well tested, extensively documented, and reliable stack of software management tools with the RPM Package Manager (RPM) at its core. The precompiled HEP software packages can be deployed easily and without detailed Linux system knowledge and are kept up-to-date through the regular system update process. The precompiled packages were tested on multiple installations of openSUSE, RHEL clones, and Fedora. As the RPM infrastructure is adopted by many Linux distributions, the approach can be used on more systems. In this contribution, we discuss our approach to software deployment in detail, present the software repositories for multiple RPM-based Linux distributions to a wider public and call for a collaboration for all the interested parties.