Technology: At ENEA the first European Institutional mirror of Software Heritage

The ENEA Research Center in Bologna will host the first Italian Mirror of World’s Largest Source Codes Archive: the Software Heritage Archive. Software Heritage is an established non-profit initiative launched by Inria, the French National Institute for Digital Sciences, aimed at collecting, organizing, preserving and sharing all publicly available open source code. Sharing the vision that software is a precious part of our cultural heritage, ENEA is very proud to collaborate to this important project by keeping a full copy of the contents of the archive.

Today is impossible to do science without advanced computational facilities and simulation modelling. ENEA has a very strong and long tradition in these fields and is deeply aware that preserving the knowledge and the intelligence embodied in software source codes is a crucial point.

Furthermore, the availability of such a precious digital mine allows large-scale analysis of the its contents with different purposes: reconstructing the evolution of the software, following its origin, extracting information through a sort of "Big Code Analysis” in analogy with what is done for Big Data, to enrich the training offer in computer programs.

To guarantee the higher resilience of the system, it is essential the development of a geographic network of mirrors, implemented using a variety of storage technologies, running in various administrative domains, controlled by different institutions. ENEA will work with Software Heritage team to establish in Bologna the first European institutional mirror of the Archive.

“We are delighted to welcome ENEA – says Professor Roberto Di Cosmo, Director of Software Heritage –  as our first European institutional mirror, and look forward to work together on the new challenges that this collaboration will allow us to address”.

“Faithful to its mission of public service, ENEA is proud to establish in its Bologna Center the first European institutional mirror of Software Heritage, contributing to preserve humankind's source code, and adding a valuable piece to the complex ecosystem that today makes the Emilia Romagna Region an outpost of supercomputing and Data Science”, has  pointed out  Silvio Migliori, Director of ICT ENEA Division.