CHESS provides a simple new method for users to obtain scientific software
In many cases, these software packages are “research code”: works in progress written by scientists, not software developers, who are willing to share their effort with other scientists. Users frequently find that obtaining and running such software can be difficult and time consuming. In response, researchers at CHESS have been contributing to a new open-source package manager developed by Continuum Analytics called “Conda”, which provides simple access to a wide variety of scientific software packages written in C, Fortran, Python, R, etc.