Online collaborative environment to run the eastern bluefin tuna stock assessment workflow

In this note, we describe an approach which makes possible to execute online the set of codes used for eastern bluefin tuna (BFT-E) stock assess-ment at ICCAT. In 2014, ICCAT BFT-E working group has been able to execute thousands of model runs by using parallelization of R and Fortran codes on a supercomputer. This new approach has a lot of scientific benefits, but very few participants would be able to reproduce it without specific skills. Since november 2015, the H2020 BlueBridge project is funding an engineer to set up a WebSite (or VRE for Virtual Research Environment) where users will be able to parametrize and execute various steps of the BFT-E stock assessment workflow. By repackaging codes provided by ICCAT BFT-E working group the same codes are now executable online. They can be parametrized, executed and edited by anybody from a simple web page and data outputs are delivered in standard data format. At this stage, this VRE comes with various collaborative Web Services: a workspace to share documents or data, Web pages or RStudio server to process data online and an automated report service to dynamically generate documents packaging these results. Such a collaborative environment enables to store and access the whole set of data and source codes to replicate past results or to try new parametrizations of the model with usual tools or simple web forms. Such an approach is expected to give more transparency and collaboration within working groups.