The NEA Management Board for the Development, Application and Validation of Nuclear Data and Codes (MBDAV) held its biannual meeting on 21-22 September 2020 with 29 delegates and two invitees from 22 countries, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC). During this meeting, the governing body had a comprehensive discussion on the new MBDAV strategy, which aims to provide better services to end users and adapt the NEA Data Bank services to new computing infrastructures.
The participants reviewed the progress of the Data Bank GitLab infrastructure development and endorsed a pilot project of open source development using the GitLab infrastructure. Installed locally on the NEA servers, GitLab is a powerful versioning platform that supports collaborative work and continuous integration processes. This new infrastructure will be used for the collaborative development of the JEFF-4 library, as well as for the hosting of an open source code catalogue. New services to code developers and users will be offered too, such as a restricted area for collaborative development, an issue tracking system, and wiki pages.
Another highlight of the meeting was the approval of a task force on open science for data and software preservation. This new task force will aim to identify new roles and services for and contribute to the discussions on the long-term vision for the Data Bank, which is uniquely positioned with the NEA as a portal to external nuclear data users.
The MBDAV members also agreed to prepare a document on the long-term vision of the Data Bank, and endorsed the MBDAV bureau to continue discussions with other NEA Standing Technical Committees on data preservation challenges.
