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Opening with @neurocy.bsky.social explaining the 'working group' model we're doing for the 3rd PROPL

There are clear roles for computer scientists to have a role in managing planetary health, and we can win! #propl26

There'll be a split PROPL this year; a morning set of position papers (including climate modeling), and then a working group where we'll put concrete action items together for what the PL/systems community can work on together on!

While there are many digital commons out there for scientific data, the future digital commons must also *compute* using FAIR principles, says @neurocy.bsky.social doi.org/10.1145/3759...

By FAIR, we mean good support for findability, accessibiilty, interoperability, reproducibility, while supporting liveness at scale.

We need to get out into the wider world and consider the incentive structures for who will actually use these systems. The benefits of this new structure cannot just go towards those regions that don't need it help.

Next up, @deepakcherian.bsky.social presents Icechunk, a storage system that scales with the whole planet!

Deepak's a great example of someone who wouldn't ordinarily attend @sigplan-pldi.bsky.social; he's a 'professional scientist' who has worked on terabyte scale oceanic models, and now maintains important scientific infrastructure like xarray

Icechunk is a cloud-native Rust-based chunked, compressed storage format for ndarray. It's got a hierarchical data model which cherrypicks from the best ideas in netCDF and so on and crucially promotes rigor via version control, isolated transactions and snapshots, says @deepakcherian.bsky.social

Since it's a big storage system, stability is super important for a cloud-native weather format. Public providers are moving to it, for example for weather forecasts and cloud data. It supports 'virtual' datasets built from piles of other data so you can compose vast datasets via 'symlinking'

@deepakcherian.bsky.social notes that Icechunk requires a level of homogeneity which doesn't work well for some data. Need cross-language FFIs (something @neurocy.bsky.social also observed). Earth sciences is missing database ideas like incremental view/streaming compute and derived fields