NuGrid/NuDocker: A virtual research environment for computational nuclear and stellar astrophysics

The motivation behind NuDocker is to conserve the capability of running nuclear and stellar astrophysics simulations codes from many years ago, even if the commonly adapted compute environment has evolved (compilers, OS utilities, libraries). Thus the main goal of NuDocker is reproducibility of science. The stellar evolution code MESA and the NuGrid post-processing codes are big code instruments with lots of modules and dependencies that all have to play perfectly together. Rich Townsend's MESA SDK has significantly taken the pain out of compiling such codes. Nevertheless, it is still difficult to maintain on one actual computer the capability to run different versions of MESA, especially going back to the older versions. At the same time, a lot of important results have been obtained with these older revisions which in many cases are not obsolete, but just different MESA flavours.