Making scientific computations reproducible

Matthias Schwab, Martin Karrenbach, and Jon Claerbout

matt@sep.Stanford.EDU, martin@sep.Stanford.EDU, jon@sep.Stanford.EDU

ABSTRACT

To organize computational scientific research and hence to conveniently transfer our technology, we impose a simple filing discipline on the authors in our laboratory. A document's makefile includes laboratory-wide standard rules that offer readers these four standard commands: make burn removes the document's result figures, make build recomputes them, make tube displays the figures, and make clean removes any intermediate files. Although we developed these standards to aid readers we discovered that authors are often the principal beneficiaries.