BCE stands for the Berkeley Common (or Compute, or Collaborative…) Environment. It was designed to provide a common Linux computational environment for classwork and research.
Development on BCE concluded in Fall 2017.
The goal for the BCE is to provide both the ready-made environments and also the “recipes” or scripts setting up these environments. It should be easy for a competent Linux user to create recipes for custom tools that might not be broadly useful (and thus, not already in BCE).
BCE is designed for classwork and research in the sciences at Berkeley, broadly defined to include social science, life science, physical science, and engineering. Using these tools, users can start up a virtual machine (VM) with a standardized Linux operating environment containing a set of standard software for scientific computing. The user can start the VM on their laptop, on a university server, or in the cloud. Furthermore, users will be able to modify the instructions for producing or modifying the virtual machine in a reproducible way for communication with and distribution to others.
We envision the following core use cases:
What problems does BCE solve for you?
To accomplish this, we envision that BCE will encompass the following:
BCE is a project started by D-Lab and the SCF (Statistical Computing Facility). Current collaborators include BRC (Berkeley Research Computing), the School of Information, the Linguistics Department, and other independent contributors.
To see how we provision BCE, check out our Github page, following the instructions in the HOWTO page of the provisioning directory.