first draft of nasa-rose-2020 blog post

Author: mattip

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apps/labs/posts/nasa-rose-grant-2020.md

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+---
+title: 'NASA ROSES E7 Grant: Reinforcing the Fondations of Scientific Python'
+author: matti-picus
+published: Aug 10, 2022
+description: 'Announcing a 3-year program to improve NumPy, Scipy, pandas, and scikit-learn'
+category: [Funding]
+featuredImage:
+  src: /posts/nasa-rose-grant-2020/scientific_python_ecosystem.png
+  alt: 'River of scientific python projects, flowing from Python and Numpy, to
+       Foundational projects, to technique-specific projects, to domain-specific
+       projects, to applications.'
+hero:
+  src: /posts/nasa-rose-grant-2020/scientific_python_ecosystem.png
+  alt: 'River of scientific python projects, flowing from Python and Numpy, to
+       Foundational projects, to technique-specific projects, to domain-specific
+       projects, to applications.'
+---
+
+### Announcement of the grant being awarded
+
+We are happy and proud to announce that the [NASA Rose 2020](https://science.nasa.gov/researchers/sara/grant-solicitations/roses-2020/release-research-opportunities-space-and-earth-science-roses-2020)
+program, specifically the [Support for Open Source Tools, Frameworks and Libraries](https://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/solicitations/summary.do?solId=%7B958CF134-D655-E512-B5AD-84501D14A0C1%7D&path=&method=init)
+component, has accepted [a
+proposal](/posts/nasa-rose-grant-2020/NASA_project_proposal.pdf)
+from the Scientific Python community. The 
+[selection](https://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/viewrepositorydocument?cmdocumentid=843923&solicitationId={958CF134-D655-E512-B5AD-84501D14A0C1}&viewSolicitationDocument=1)
+(link broken) is for a 3-year, $385,385 per year grant, which will be split between the participating
+projects: [scikit-learn](https://scikit-learn.org),
+[Pandas](https://pandas.org/), [SciPy](https://scipy.org/) and
+[NumPy](https://numpy.org/).
+
+### Backstory
+
+Once the [NASA Rose]()
+funding proposal opened, the working group began creating a proposal that
+answered the conditions of the program. The proposal was based on an earlier
+[rejectd NSF
+proposal](https://figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/Mid-Scale_Research_Infrastructure_-_The_Scientific_Python_Ecosystem/8009441).
+Many of the authors of the NSF proposal were also involved in the successful
+NASA Rose proposal. The process of pulling the proposal together: laying out
+the scope of the program, splitting the grant writing into sections, and
+overall cooperation between the groups was in and of itself helpful to get many
+of the people at the core of scientific python together.
+
+###    Deliverables
+The [Gantt chart](/posts/nasa-rose-grant-2020/NASA_project_workplan.pdf)
+summarizes the primary deliverables of the project:
+- Ongoing work with issue triaging & code review, maintenance, CI & packaging
+  improvements
+- Creating a joint infrastructure for running benchmarks and create both
+  micro-benchmarks and more general benchmarks for the projects 
+- Use NumPy's new dtype infrastructure to create a flexible Unicode string
+  type, and integrate that into Pandas
+- More NumPy SIMD performance improvements
+- Move forward with Array API adoption
+- Extend the use of Numba UDFs in Pandas
+- Optimize Pandas' memory usage, and use more cython in sckit-learn
+- Add support for CuPY and Dask to Scipy and scikit-learn via the Array API
+- Add a framework for parallelization to SciPy
+- Add large-scale optizmiation routines to SciPy
+
+The goals are quite ambitious given the modest funding. They leverage synergy between the projects and underlying standards to move the entire scientific python community forward.
+
+### Who will be doing the work
+
+The work will be  executed by a mix of experienced maintainers and new talent
+recruited specifically for the project. Due to restrictions from the funders,
+research will be primarily executed by people in the USA, while the
+international team will take on the engeneering and contributor tasks. Some of
+the work will be subcontracted to LANL and Cal Poly.
+
+The grant will be administered via a comittee. Dharhas Pothina, the CTO of
+[Quansight](https://quansight.com/), will be the PI. Leaders of the
+participating projects will advise and monitor activities and changes in scope
+to make sure they are aligned with what the projects need most.
+
+### Final thoughts
+
+This is a significant milestone in the growing stream of funding flowing toward
+OpenSource and Scientific Python projects. The grant is one of the first to
+specifically fund cross-project collaboration, in a way that will leverage
+common interests toward improving the entire ecosystem. Institutional funders
+are realizing that we are indeed a web of interlinked projects supported by a
+community of contributors, and we are thankful to NASA for the opportunity to
+spearhead this new model.
+
+We'll provide updates in future blog posts as we achieve significant progress
+toward the goals of the grants.
+
+These are exciting times, funding for core PyData projects is accelerating.