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Stan Docker Image Plans

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Nicusor Serban edited this page Jul 27, 2020 · 5 revisions

This page serves to collect ideas for an official Stan Docker image.

Use-cases

  • Self-contained environment for teaching
  • Reference stack to build upon for doing reproducible research
  • Debugging and development of Stan by developers
  • Automated build and test system

The question is how exactly the group satisfies a particular use case when the Stan project offers so many options to potential users. It might make more sense to think about how technical implementations map onto use-cases, with the hope to minimize the number of different images we would need to maintain.

  • An interactive session like JupyterHub or Rstudio server would be invaluable in a class but unnecessary when trying to do integration testing.
  • Applied researchers using one of the R interfaces would likely want a number of other Stan connected R packages, while those adding functionality to Stan Math probably don't need posterior or loo.

Important Questions

  • Which interfaces and components in StanDev should get their own dedicated image?
  • Should pre-compiled be included?
  • Which existing Docker software stack(s) should these containers build upon?

Jupyter Docker Stack Proposal

Desired Features

  • fast compiles (clang?)
  • different compiler settings for modelling or Stan development
  • support for compilation with ccache to speedup re-compilation
  • persistency through Docker volumes(?) or local mounts ( maybe docker-compose? )
  • pre-deploy Stan libraries such as the TBB, boost
  • MPI enable / disabled
  • Integration with Jenkins
  • Integration with Rocker project
  • Integration with JupyterHub
  • Rapid availability with each release (maybe even a dev version supporting to create the image from git hashes)
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