openjournals
Pre-submission enquiry
Dear JOSS,
would you consider elauksap/mk for submission?
mk is a suite of scripts that enables to compile common scientific packages in the form of pre-compiled binaries available for Linux x86-64 platforms.
A toolchain based on gcc-glibc/11 (currently) is first compiled. Then, based upon it, common tools (bash, make, CMake, Python, ...) and other scientific software (boost, BLAS/LAPACK, MUMPS, Octave, R, Fenics, ...) are compiled and packed into a portable binary-compatible archive. The installation path and packages can be customized.
The user extracts such archive on their system and by loading a set of shell scripts all packages can be loaded/unloaded (mk is based on Lmod).
mk serves the purpose of reproducing a build environment for scientific software on different machines.
In my research group it has been succesfully and thoroughly used both for teaching and research purposes (we deliver it to our students and use it both on our personal machines and on our HPC facilities as a build environment for the software we are developing, in particular the lifex library for finite-element simulations of the cardiac function).
A Dockerfile is available to automatize the build.
Instructions available in INSTALL.md and as the first lines of the Dockerfile.
Thanks a lot in advance.
Best regards, Pasquale Africa
