Modern tools to scale the building, testing and deployment of scientific software

Introduction

This is a topic to provide additional information to my EGU26 talk: Modern tools to scale the building, testing and deployment of scientific software.

PDF version of Slides: EGU2026.pdf (1.9 MB)

Prerecorded version in case there were technical difficulties:

Build CI

The build-ci workflow referenced is available at this GitHub repo:

An example of it’s use is the MOM5 (ocean model component) repository

which has scheduled tests and pull request (CI) tests that use this action.

The ACCESS spack packages repository also uses this action for CI testing of modifications to the spack packages

As well as a workflow dispatch interface to test all packages against new versions of spack and our spack configuration.

Build CD

The build-cd workflow referenced is available in this GitHub repo:

The ACCESS-ESM1.6 deployment repository referenced in the talk utilises this workflow:

And an example of a pull request workflow, with associated pre-release builds, is PR #181 which changed the coupler code to use a local fork.

The deployment workflow automatically adds provenance information to our model release database.

This workflow is also used in two other repositories to provide general purposes software deployments

Spack infrastructure

We maintain a spack fork to streamline configuring spack for deploying to gadi@NCI.

Our spack configuration is available in the ACCESS-NRI/spack-config repo

Citing

If you wanted to cite the talk:

Heerdegen, A., Gatti, T., Jayasuriya, H., McAdam, T., Basevi, J., and Druken, K.: Modern tools to scale the compilation, testing and deployment of scientific software , EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-8712, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-8712, 2026.

Feedback

If you want to ask questions feel free to reply to this topic or email me directly. I you don’t have an account you will need to register.

QR Code

Use this QR code to reference this topic: