BURRITO: Wrapping Your Lab Notebook in Computational Infrastructure

Researchers in fields such as bioinformatics, CS, finance, and applied math have trouble managing the numerous code and data files generated by their computational experiments, comparing the results of trials executed with different parameters, and keeping up-to-date notes on what they learned from past successes and failures.

We created a Linux-based system called BURRITO that automates aspects of this tedious experiment organization and notetaking process, thus freeing researchers to focus on more substantive work. BURRITO automatically captures a researcher’s computational activities and provides user interfaces to annotate the captured provenance with notes and then make queries such as, “Which script versions and command-line parameters generated the output graph that this note refers to?”