UC Berkeley, Cal Poly Receive $6 Million for Open Source Project
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.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].