Funding, Grants & Awards

UC Berkeley, Cal Poly Receive $6 Million for Open Source Project

• By Leila Meyer
• 07/09/15

Project Jupyter, an open-source software project led by Fernando Perez of University of California, Berkeley and Brian Granger of California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo has been granted $6 million over the next three years. The grant will help expand Project Jupyter to support scientific computing and data science applications in more than 40 programming languages.

Project Jupyter grew out of IPython, an environment for interactive computing. Originally, IPython supported scientific computing with the Python programming language, but eventually it grew to support numerous other programming languages. In 2014, the IPython community split the language-agnostic parts of IPython into a separate project called Project Jupyter.

Perez and Granger worked on the IPython project previously and now lead Project Jupyter at their institutions. With the help of this grant, they will work to expand the capabilities of the Jupyter Notebook, which is "a Web-based platform that allows scientists, researchers and educators to combine live code, equations, narrative text and rich media into a single, interactive document," according to a news release. The team plans to expand the capabilities of the Jupyter Notebook to provide users with "easier access to collaborative computing and reusing their content in a wide range of settings, such as standalone Web applications and dashboards."

Project Jupyter supports the academic and scientific communities, as well as data scientists in research, education, industry and journalism, according to Perez. Scientists and academics use Jupyter for tasks such as analyzing massive gene sequencing datasets, processing images from the Hubble Space Telescope and developing models of financial markets. On the other end of the spectrum, teachers can use the Jupyter Notebook to prepare dynamic Web-based slide shows, and students can use it for homework and reports.

Further information about Project Jupyter can be found on the project's site.